


Wonderstruck

by VictoriaSkyeMarsters



Category: Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2009), Deadline Gallipoli, Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Extended Universe - Fandom
Genre: Alcoholism, Anal Sex, EatTheRare, Ellis treats women like crap, Hannibal Extended Universe, Hannigram - Freeform, Historical Inaccuracy, M/M, Minor Violence, Paris 1917, Pining, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rimming, Sexy bits, but there is a slap, get a grip Igor, mustache husbands, only because Igor is sooooo ridiculous and serious, pianos are sexy, rarepairs, so much cigarette smoke, some slow burn, the word 'thrust' is used a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-10
Updated: 2016-09-10
Packaged: 2018-08-14 07:02:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8002834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VictoriaSkyeMarsters/pseuds/VictoriaSkyeMarsters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Following Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett’s return from Gallipoli, he’s stricken with nightmares. It’s not until he meets a rather surly Russian composer that he’s able to find any peace. Meanwhile, Ellis’ face becomes the only thing Igor Stravinsky can think about, his sole source of inspiration. What will happen when their mutual passions reach their tipping point?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> *Made with love for the #EatTheRare fest! 
> 
> *I feel the need to warn that this story begins with some hetero sex. I know, I know. Don't worry. It doesn't last. ALSO, I majorly screwed around with the timeline of the world to selfishly meet my narrative needs. So you know, the original performance of Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' took place in 1913. I've moved it to 1917, since I wanted Ellis to be post Gallipoli. :) Enjoy the mustache!husbands.

Ellis supposed she was good enough as he leaned back in the pink velvet armchair. He certainly wasn’t one of those men who complained about a woman’s mouth when it was anywhere near approaching his cock, whether her skills were the most titillating or tedious; the end results were consistently identical. Her red-lipsticked mouth slid up and down, plunging slick over his length. Her lips were puffed with effort and the surrounding circle of skin was stained with Crimson Rose, but he didn’t have to watch her blow him to know what it looked like, so he kept his eyes on the gilded hotel ceiling. The place really was more than he could afford to rent, he mused, shivering appropriately when she grazed her teeth against his sensitive skin. With the utmost politeness, he squeezed her shoulder, and she pulled off, wiping the back of her milky white hand across her mouth. 

“That’s how we do it in Paris,” she smirked, shifting off her knees to straddle Ellis’ lap. 

He palmed her buttocks, each of his large hands fanning the expanse of one plump, silk covered ass cheek. When she wiggled in his lap, he smacked her bottom accordingly and slid that hand straight up her dress, landing dexterously in a thick thatch of hair. 

“A lovely city, Paris,” said Ellis. Slipping his second hand up her dress was as simple as it was expected, and he did it with a lifetime’s practice at his back, smoothly and with finesse. “I’ve always said so.” 

Her hips were wide and soft, and his fingers dug in firmly, causing her to throw back her head with a pleased sigh. Ellis thought that was rather a dramatic touch. He almost always thought theatricality had a limited place in the bedroom - or bar bathroom, or cat club, or wherever else Ellis found himself sexually engaged – and that when a woman threw her head back and sighed, or moaned to excess, or started panting anything along the lines of “harder, faster, more,” it took away from the authenticity, sullied the purity of the act. Gwendoline, when they had made love, would breathe heavy and hot against his ear, and sometimes she would say things to spur him on, sometimes she would scream, but that was alright, wasn’t it? Because Ellis had known it wasn’t a performance. But the woman in his lap, waving her cleavage in his face, was not Gwendoline, and her brand of enthusiasm reeked of the cheap showmanship he disdained. 

Again, the woman that wasn’t Gwendoline Churchill tossed her head back, exposing her throat to Ellis, and although he now considered her a bit of a phony, he still wanted to fuck her, and so he smoothed one of his hands to cup her crotch while his other hand held tight around the small of her swayed back. His lips touched to her offered neck, kissing the skin obediently. She tasted like the chemical tang of perfume, and he pulled away from the kiss with a crinkle of distaste in his brow and a flare in his nostrils. She didn’t see, of course, because her bloody head was thrown so far back. 

“Do you want me to show you how we do it in London?” he asked. She craned her neck upright at his question, perusing him with heavy lids. A rosy smudge of lipstick still haloed her mouth, her Parisian penalty, and Ellis wiped at an edge of it with his thumb. His other thumb rubbed in the space between her lace undergarments and damp heat. Her crotch felt humid against his skin, and he gazed at her imploringly.

“Show me,” she said, and he hoisted her from the chair. She wrapped her thighs around his waist with a squeal, and Ellis would have rolled his eyes but she was watching him now, waiting to be kissed. She had to wait for him to walk from the chair to the bed, which was the span of the sitting room, and then scant yards to the bedroom, thus granting them the chance to see one another before he threw her unceremoniously to the mattress and mounted her from behind. But on the walk, as his bare cock bobbed against the crack of her behind, he saw a buxomly brunette with flushed skin and smudged lipstick, and she saw a comely English fellow with strikingly blue eyes and a fashionable mustache. 

She bounced when he tossed her to the bed, and he wasted no time climbing behind her, flipping her to her hands and knees and pushing her fleshy thighs apart, and although she did not throw her head back with a pleased sigh, she did hang it forward and groan obnoxiously. He took that as permission and proceeded to fuck her, after pressing the kiss she’d desired against her smooth and supple derriere. 

It went as well as expected, Ellis thought, for both parties. He ejaculated all over her silk dress, and she may or may not have achieved an orgasm. He didn’t ask and she didn’t tell him, and when it was done, Ellis lit himself a cigarette and went to smoke it by the open window. He switched his attention between watching the street and watching the woman as she swiftly passed out on his bed. Usually, he preferred to sleep alone, but, on that night, he lacked the energy to expel her from his space. Request of her departure may have required him to remember her name, and he couldn’t quite, at the moment, remember. So he smoked his cigarette and enjoyed the laxness in his muscles he knew would soon give way to trauma. 

When he had burned the slim cigarette down to the smallest nub, he flicked its remainders out the window. It was too dark to watch it hit the street far below, but he watched it until it disappeared from his view, and then he joined the woman on the bed. He was relieved when she didn’t try to snuggle him, and he kept clear away from her, settling onto his back and staring at the ceiling and hoping, hoping desperately, that tonight would be the night he’d finally find some sleep. 

\--

Hours later, in the deadlight of a cloud-covered moon, Ellis, in a desperate quest to escape the rotting hands clutching at his ankles, awoke with a shudder. He shuffled his body to sitting, scurrying backwards on the mattress until his shoulders banged the headboard. He folded his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them as he shook. Sweat dripped down his face, and already he could feel the breeze from the window cooling the soaked bangs that fell over red-rimmed eyes. With a pained shiver, he reached for the cigarettes on his nightstand. His hands were too weak, too unsteady with tremors for him to strike the match on the first attempt, nor could he achieve flame on the second or third, and on the fourth, successful though it was, the repetition of noise culminated in the waking up of the woman whose name he couldn’t quite remember. He didn’t bother to mask his groan of displeasure when she rolled to her side and faced him with sleepy eyes. 

“What are you doing?” she asked, lifting to lean on a knobby elbow.

Ellis rose from the bed and stormed from the room. His feet guided him to the bar in the sitting room where he proceeded to pour himself a copious fill of brandy. It burned down his throat and he collapsed himself on the pink velvet chair beside the liquor tray. Brandy sloshed over his hand and he unconsciously licked it clean. He had hoped that spending himself into another warm body before bed might exhaust his brain and prevent the nightmares. It hadn’t worked. It never worked. But he never stopped trying. And perhaps, he ventured whilst pouring himself more brandy, the scorch of drink would burn away what human company could not. He drank down more peachy-tinted liquid, welcoming the punishing burn that coated his insides, but the rotting hands, the field of corpses he traipsed through, still reached for him at every shutting of his eyes. 

When his cigarette was sucked to its halfway point, the woman came peeking around the bedroom doorframe. She appraised Ellis, cowered and shivering, his emptied tumbler clutched to his chest with a white-knuckled hand. He did not turn to her, but he could feel her staring at him, sickeningly doe-eyed and curious toward the piteous grown man wrenched from bed by nightmares. 

“What’s wrong?” she asked sweetly, and it was that cloying taint in her voice, so unlike Gwendoline’s, that crushed his desire to be nice.

“Get out,” Ellis said with a voice low and graveled. 

“Pardon?” asked the woman, stepping from the shade of the doorframe to reveal her naked form. The golden glow from Ellis’ oil lamp threw ominous shadows across her body, casting odd shapes beneath her bosom and making the triangle between her legs appear black and bottomless. 

“I said,” whispered Ellis, his hands shaking so horribly he had to slam down his glass and throw his cigarette into the ashtray so he might tug at his hair to steady them, “I’d like for you to leave. Please.”

She gawked at him and struck a hand to her hip. “You want me to leave?” she asked, the sweetness gone from her voice. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“I know what time it is,” Ellis growled. Sweat poured down his face. Nausea squeezed his gut with rotten fists. He needed her gone, and he needed her gone that second, but she only stepped closer, as if revealing more of her naked body would inspire Ellis’ desire to have her stay. It did not. “Get out!” he yelled, holding his head in both hands and staring heatedly at the rug. Its patterns swirled and spiraled and he had to shut his eyes to keep his rising bile at bay, but the sight behind his eyes was worse. The putrid hands reached for him. He opened his eyes, stood from the chair, and pointed toward the door. “You need to leave,” he demanded, his voice shrill and pleading. 

The woman took a step back at his outburst, her mouth hanging wide from the surprise of his capricious mood. When he directed his hot gaze to her, she retreated fully, scampering back to the bedroom to gather her things. When she came back out, she was dressed and slipping on her second high heel. 

“You’re a bastard,” she hissed in his general direction as she stormed past him for the front door.

“There’s cab money on the stand,” he said, meeker now that she was on her way out. 

She turned to him with a flushed, red face. “You’re fucked up,” she spat, but when she turned to leave, her little hand still darted out to the table and scooped up the money. He watched her stuff the cash haphazardly into her flashy, beaded handbag before the door slammed.

He clutched his stomach helplessly and walked quickly to the bathroom where he vomited up a quarter bottle of brandy. When he rinsed his face in the sink, a hollowed stare greeted him in the mirror. His reflection was scarcely recognizable, so dark were the circles under his eyes, so pale were his lips. A glance at his pocket watch told him it was only three in the morning. He passed the time before dawn smoking cigarettes, watching the tendrils of smoke waft from his nose and filter through the hairs of his mustache. His features drifted behind the clouds of smoke, obscuring his eyes and hiding him from the corpses that still reached with bloodied flesh and splintered, bleached bones. 

\--

And so Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett passed another night, much the same as all nights previously passed, all nights post his time spent in Gallipoli, chilled by his terror-sweats, unable to sleep longer than a few meager hours. But when the sun came up, he bathed, took special care parting his hair, grooming his mustache, and tying his tie in a whimsically stylish knot. By the time he met his friend for breakfast at the café on the corner, he was back in considerable control. He crossed his legs beneath the patio table and winked at the waitress taking their drink orders. He sipped his tea and smoked his cigarette and laughed loudly at his friend’s jokes as if he’d not spent the night warding off the horrifying images of violent days past. 

“Christine thinks you’re a bastard,” said Perkins, his subtle French accent twisting teasingly as he buttered his toast. “Now, why ever would she say such a thing, Bartlett?”

Ellis grinned mischievously and knocked an ash from the end of his cigarette. Christine, then, he thought, had been her name. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” he said. 

“You didn’t toss her to the curb in the middle of the night?” Perkins asked, his voice far from accusatory and lined with ample amusement. Ellis was thankful for his friend, who found such entertainment in his romps that he encouraged them with gusto. It was Perkins who had suggested Ellis come to Paris, to escape the spotlight aimed toward him in London, not entirely flattering. To get away from the Churchills and the newspapers. A well deserved break, Perkins called it, and he consistently threw a multitude of social events in Ellis’ direction, and every event was chased with a different escort, always pretty, always French, always willing to succumb to Ellis’ English charms. And Ellis, for all his faults, was dangerously charming, when he wasn’t kicking women out of his hotel room at three in the morning. At least, he used to be.

“That would have been unforgivably rude of me,” Ellis said. He crunched into a bite of toast, narrowing his eyes at Perkins, who was practically brimming with good humor. 

“Well,” Perkins said, “you’ll have to find another date for tonight.”

Ellis lifted a brow, a self-proclaimed expert at feigning intrigue. “And what, daresay, is on the agenda for tonight?”

“I’m glad you asked,” said his friend. “Tonight, you and I are attending a ballet.”

“A ballet, you say?” Ellis asked with a spark of genuine interest. He was a fan of music to be sure, having recently purchased a gramophone, a rarity even amongst the elitists of the elite. “What’s the nature of this ballet? Why are you so keen on attending?”

“Because it’s not just any ballet, my friend,” Perkins said, polishing off his tea. “It’s a Russian ballet. Isn’t that grand? The composer’s supposedly a real up and comer. I can’t remember his name, but it’s predicted to be quite the to-do. Everyone will be there.”

“Oh, then we must attend,” Ellis agreed. 

“We must, we must. Excellent,” said Perkins. “It’s decided. How exotic of us.”

“Exotic, indeed,” said Ellis. He finished his toast and speculated on the idea of the ballet, finding himself in the strange position of both dreading and anticipating the fall of night. 

\--

The theatre was crowded, an assembly of Paris’ High Society, costumed in their finest gowns and diamonds and coat tails and starched collars. Ellis and Perkins enjoyed drinks in the parlor across the street and would dine after the show, as was tradition, but for now, they slinked through the clustered, glitzy Parisians, stopping occasionally to speak with someone or other that Perkins maintained was of the utmost importance amongst the this or that, Ellis shaking hands and smiling so often his jaw ached, smoking cigarette after cigarette, desperate to busy himself and fill the void that loomed imminently upon the approaching darkness. 

It took ages to reach their seats, four in total for their personal assembly. Ellis and Perkins sat beside each other in the center, their dates boxing them in on either side. Accompanying Ellis for the evening was a slim redhead whose name was Viola. He made an effort to repeat it several times, to ingrain it in his memory, but by the time the lights were flashing, alerting the audience the show was about to begin, he had already forgotten, his mind too full of a childlike excitement. He did love music, and found himself clenching his hands anxiously as he waited for the curtains to open. 

The orchestra announced itself in the box at the foot of the stage, tuning their instruments in a rising crescendo of competing tings and strums and thumps. Ellis turned around in his seat to have a look at the audience, just in time to spot a figure entering through the back doors, a masculine shadow that slipped into an aisle seat in the very back row and steepled his hands beneath his chin. Ellis turned back in his chair as the lights began to dim.

The curtains whispered open, rustling to the outskirts of the stage. On a dark arena, a girl crouched beneath a solitary spotlight. Ellis leaned forward in his seat. And then the music began. 

It was jolting. Ellis sat up straight in his chair, rapt in his attention toward the stage. The young girl unfolded, a bloom unfurling as a pulsating rhythm of music was struck. More dancers entered the scene, dressed as savages, encircling the girl, their bodies moving in strange, jerky motions. Ellis heard movement in the row behind him as a man tilted his top hat down over his eyes in jest. A woman seated in front of Ellis’ date was leaning to whisper in her companion’s ear, but her volume was loud and uncensored. He heard her insults, and so did everyone in all the surrounding rows. 

On the stage, the young girl was jumping up and down, high on her heels, while savages danced a ring around her. Ellis tried to ignore the jaunts and jeers picking up swiftly throughout the audience. He strained his ears to listen, for the music was haunting and unpredictable, and it had Ellis’ heart racing. Erratic pulses, building and building, growing louder and louder. It was like nothing he had heard before, the ballet like nothing he had seen before. He couldn’t look away, not until the aggressive booing began and people leapt from their seats. 

“I’ve never seen a reaction like this!” Perkins raved beside Ellis, and Ellis tore his eyes from the stage to face his friend, who was standing up with everyone else. A couple behind them was trying to squeeze their way to the aisle, but they were blocked by jeering men with canes, which they began waving above their heads as they shouted at the orchestra to stop playing. 

Ellis’ date grabbed his forearm. “Let’s get out of here,” she begged, touching a hand to her stiff red curls to test their fortitude. He raised a brow at Perkins, who shrugged his acquiescence, and at that the foursome began their descent from the theatre. It was no easy feat. The music still played, booms of sound exploding, and Ellis kept an eye on the stage as they pushed through the rioting wildlings that were supposed to be Paris’ finest, fur-lined elegants. The girl was still jumping and spinning, faster and faster, to the beat that joined her in a frenzy of blood-pumping energy. Ellis was thoroughly distracted, so much so he was nearly hit in the head by a weaponized gentleman’s cane. His gloved hand came up to block it before it struck him in the nose, and it was then he realized the extent of the audience’s negative reaction. The room had truly turned on the performance, the dancers and musicians both, and before long Ellis could no longer hear the exquisite detail of the music for the yells and screams of anger. The lights began to flash. He heard a siren. 

The mix of sounds rang disturbingly in Ellis’ ears, and he had to stop on the stairs to grasp at the rail. Perkins and the women didn’t see him, and he didn’t stop them from abandoning him to his own devices on the steps, quietly beginning to fall to panic. The screams surrounding him sounded too familiar. The elbows and hands brushing his arms as bodies passed by to reach the exit felt too familiar. A rotund man rammed into his side as he pushed past, and Ellis shut his eyes and flattened himself against the wall. 

Dead bodies everywhere. Gunfire. Wails of the dying. Limbs flying, detached, blood splattering the muddy trench, hot on his cheek. 

Ellis pried open his lids and barreled through the surging crowd, shoving and clawing his way to the emergency exit. He rushed down the hall until he reached a door, any door, and he went through it without hesitance. When his eyes unblurred from the nightmare around him, he realized he was outside, in a back alley behind the theatre. The ground was wet from a rainstorm, and it drizzled still, cool enough and steady enough to bring forth a sigh of relief from Ellis’ mouth. He tilted his head to the falling few drops and leaned his back wearily against the bricks. He breathed in, deep, harrowing breaths, thankful that he alone had found the isolated place to hide. At least, Ellis thought he was alone until he heard the strike of a match. He looked about, not seeing anyone at first. He had to take a few steps from the wall to spot him, the man standing around the corner and bringing a cigarette up to his lips. 

Not a bad idea, Ellis determined, reaching for his own cigarettes and trying to keep quiet and unnoticed by the other man, whose back was turned in Ellis’ direction, and whose head was bowed low, his only movements the lifting of the cigarette to his lips and the inhale and exhale of smoke. Upon surveillance of his own smoking case, however, Ellis discovered he’d lent his matchbook to Perkins, damn him, and was suddenly at the necessary mercy of the mysterious man ‘round the corner, who definitely had matches and definitely, judging by the defiant stoop of his protective posture, did not want to be disturbed. 

Ellis did not savor the notion of bothering someone so obviously bent on being alone, but he savored even less the freedom of his fingers to clench and tremble with nothing to hold. He needed a cigarette to calm his nerves, so violently intent on clawing their way out of his chest that Ellis was moved to hold a hand over his heart to steady its bothered beating. Decidedly distressed, he took the needed steps to bring him around the curve of the building. As politely as he could, he asked, in French, if he could please borrow a match. 

The man started, clearly taken aback by the sudden company, and turned his head to glimpse over his shoulder. He stared for a moment from behind small framed, circular spectacles, and then turned around to face Ellis completely. To say Ellis was unaffected would be a lie. Beneath the dark gaze of the man, Ellis nearly took a step backward, so consuming was the other’s presence. He was several inches taller than Ellis, who had never been a man who took up much space, but this man loomed beyond his superior height. The very air around him seemed to tingle, and Ellis drew in an unsteady breath, compelled to apologize for being such a bothersome wretch. But the man reaching into his coat pocket stunted Ellis’ words, and he waited silently. At the retrieval of a pack of matches, the man stepped forward, lit the match, and brought it up behind a cupped hand. Ellis slipped his cigarette between his lips and leaned into the offered flame, sucking gently at the tip until the end began to smolder. 

“Merci,” whispered Ellis, unable to look away from the man’s face. It was intense and strange, with high cheekbones and a stern center part, dark hair sweeping behind each ear. His eyes, past the veil of his glasses, were set beneath a prominent brow, pale eyebrows as severe as his pursed lips. And it was the lips Ellis found himself struggling the most to look away from, because they were unusual, exaggeratedly bowed, the upper lip especially plump as the stranger placed his own cigarette between his teeth and took a drag. Ellis wasn’t sure if it was a handsome face or not, but it was peculiar, specific, and it demanded attention. 

“You’re welcome,” said the man in English, though his accent was certainly other. 

“Dear God, is my French so poor you instantly pegged me as an Englishman?” Ellis asked with a forced breath of laughter. The man didn’t smile, or make a pronounced expression of any kind, but Ellis did think his eyes softened a touch. Then the man turned, not completely putting his back to Ellis, but excusing himself nonetheless to lean against the cold brick wall, where he resumed smoking his cigarette quietly. 

Ellis retreated a few steps back himself, leaning against the brick just around the bend, close to the other man, but separated by the partition of the corner angle. They smoked in silence, and Ellis found himself listening for the other man’s inhales, so that he might match them to his own. 

Upon the twilight of his cigarette, the man flicked his finished stub to the ground and stepped on its ember with a shiny-tipped shoe. He did not stop when he passed by Ellis, but noticeably slowed, and he did not look straight at him, but tilted his head marginally in the direction of the wall on which Ellis leaned, and then he vanished through the Emergency Exit and was gone. 

After his departure, Ellis released a sigh of tension he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. He toiled a bit longer in his solitude, lighting a new cigarette with the end of his old one, and smoking it idly before deciding it was time to head back in and find Perkins. There was a dinner to consider, after all, and an after party for the ballet which would be impolite to ignore. He straightened his hair, his tie, swallowed the last lingering flutters of anxiety, and braved his way back inside.

\--

The party was held at a popular piano bar, and Ellis moved through the smoky room with a trained smile on his face. His redheaded date had gone home, as had Perkins’, leaving the bachelors to attend the party freely, which was always a plus for two single men after the supping hours in Paris. The women danced like spirited little nymphs, long pearl necklaces jingling about their necks as they shuffled their feet to the suspiciously American, ruckus tunes bursting forth from the piano player’s fingertips. The men all smoked cigars, standing in cliquish circles, talking up their individual grandiosities, and everywhere, in every hand, was a drink, overflowing and bright. 

The mood was crazed with heightened chatter, and everyone wanted to talk about the riot, and what had caused it. Had it been the music that had so disturbed the gentiles of Paris? Or had it been the indecently writhing dancers, hopping savages, despicably inappropriate? As Ellis overheard chunks of these conversational smatterings, he thought it absurd. Surely the dancing in that very piano bar was as risqué as the ballerinas. And the music, though conspicuously unusual, had been scintillating and exciting, like the jazzy ragtime jangling the black and ivory keys that very moment. In fact, the more Ellis considered it, the more he thought it wildly unfair that the ballet had been, in his opinion, rioted against in protest to its Russian savagery, the quality Ellis found the most poignantly genius about the whole affair. 

Perkins guided Ellis by the elbow, twisting them through the busy, buzzing room, past several huddles of men, until they arrived at a particularly well-dressed set. Important looking men of the arts, with plush, velveted top hats tipsily strewn on their heads and stiff, high collars beginning to sunder to gravity’s whims and reveal stark, sunless flesh. Perkins rounded himself and Ellis into the boisterous bunch with a hand clapped to the closest man’s shoulder and a mutually shared guffaw customary of two old friends seeing one another after a long time apart. 

“Claude, you old dog!” the man bellowed with the confidence often accompanied by too much drink. 

“Rumfeld!” Perkins answered, voice clanging and overly loud. 

“What of the performance tonight? I haven’t seen you in far too long,” the one named Rumfeld said, grasping Perkins’ hands to shake them fondly within his own. “You spent too much time in London, I think, and forgot about us.”

“Ah, but I’m back now, and I’ve brought a celebrity to entertain you boring lot with!” Perkins exclaimed to many sated grins and lifted glasses. With a nod to Ellis, standing to the side and trying to follow the rapid French - which he was fluent in, but beneath the level of confidence to be completely at ease in social situations - Perkins called for the group’s attention to focus on his companion. 

“And who did you bring us?” asked another man with a colorful silk scarf looped around his neck. 

“None other than Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett,” said Perkins with a flourish of drama that had Ellis flinching. “The journalist who changed the tide in Gallipoli this year past.”

“The very same?” Rumfeld asked with a greedy grin. “The one that went up against the Churchills with Murdoch?”

“That’s the one,” Perkins verified, giving Ellis a nod of appreciation. “A very good friend of mine. He’s staying at one of my properties in the city for the season.”

“It’s a thrill to meet you, Bartlett,” the men said in drunken rumbles and variations, and then Rumfeld settled his hand on a man yet to catch Ellis’ attention, half-hidden by the angle of his shoulders, and he said, “We have something of a celebrity with us tonight, as well.” He prompted the man to turn with a squeeze of his shoulder, and Ellis found himself, for the second time that night, looking into intense, dark eyes, sequestered behind circular spectacles. “Gentlemen, meet the artist of the night, the composer of the ballet himself, Igor Stravinsky.”

Ellis was positive his eyebrows shot straight up his forehead, so shocked was he to see the man from the alley again, let alone discover he was the brain behind the bewitching music. But it made a poetic sort of sense that the man so intense Ellis could hardly bear to look at him would be some form of mastermind, the Russian savage with the oddly alluring face and the dark eyes currently blazing in his very direction. Ellis puffed out his chest and thrust out his hand, which Stravinsky took hold of at once, and they shook hands a single time before releasing. Ellis immediately slid his hand into his jacket pocket to fish for his cigarettes. He took one and held it between his lips while he patted his breast pocket for the matches he knew he didn’t have on his person anymore. And like a heady daydream, the stony-faced composer struck up a match from his own pack and stepped toward Ellis. Ellis cupped the flame himself as he leaned in to suck, his skin brushing lightly against the other’s hand, powerless to look away from the steady amber beam of the Russian’s eyes. All of this passed, mind you, in slow motion for Ellis and in the blink of an eye to everyone else in their party, and then the moment was over, and Stravinsky stepped away as Ellis inhaled a deep pull of cigarette smoke.

“So you’re the madman behind the disaster tonight,” Perkins said, second in line to shake the man’s hand. 

“Madman is a strong word, I think,” said Ellis, reaching casually behind him to accept a drink from a passing waiter’s tray. He glanced at Stravinsky with tempered reverence. “I thought it was inspired.”

Perkins laughed and began talking nonsense with Rumfeld, but Stravinsky caught and held Ellis’ eyes, and amongst the talking heads he crossed the circle to stand at his side. “You enjoyed the performance?” he asked, his voice so low Ellis had to lean close to hear. 

“What I could attend to, I enjoyed,” Ellis said. He rolled the long, slim cigarette between his fingers. “I do find it regrettable these Parisians can’t handle their scandal. I would like to have experienced it in its entirety.”

“The dancers ruined it,” Stravinsky grumbled moodily, and Ellis couldn’t help but laugh at the sour expression, receiving his own disapproving look as a result. 

“The dancers were spirited,” Ellis said. “But it was the music, I think, that moved the audience to outrage.”

“There was nothing wrong with the music,” Stravinsky harrumphed. 

“I agree,” Ellis said with a crooked grin. Stravinsky paid him a look at that, an unexpected look Ellis couldn’t quite explain. It involved the tilting of his head and the slight parting of his lips, followed by the gesture of his hand reaching up to straighten the rims of his spectacles over the bridge of his narrow nose. “Stravinsky,” Ellis said, testing the name on his tongue and chasing it with a sip of champagne. “The world will thank you for your music one day,” he said with a tip of his glass. “Accept my singular praise in the meantime, weightless as it is these days.” 

Stravinsky nodded stiffly, that same unreadable look shining in his eyes, and Ellis touched a hand to Perkins’ side. 

“I’m going to have a walk about,” Ellis told him. Perkins nodded and turned back to Rumfeld, who had claimed him utterly with his irrefutably irresistible conversational skills, leaving Ellis to bow politely away from the circle, saving a final fleeting look for Stravinsky before he spun on his heel and sauntered into the mingling crowds of the party-goers. 

It happened, as it often did in the later hours of the evening, that Ellis’ anxiety began to return. He flit about the room in a daze, mind unsure of where to settle. In one hemisphere of his brain, he could sense the inevitable reaching of dead hands and the lifeless glare of hundreds. In another, a severe face haunted him behind a puff of smoke as dancers jumped about him. Ellis drowned the tremors with more free drinks. He spoke to many pretty women and even allowed himself to be coerced into a dance with one especially lovely blonde. Her hair swung loose and long down her back and it reminded him of Gwendoline, which only proved to make him more drunk, as the thought led to an immediate downing of several more drinks. Thus it came to pass that Ellis stumbled into the men’s room to relieve himself, an unlit cigarette dangling carelessly from his lips. 

He positioned himself at a urinal and leaned an elbow against the wall while his other hand freed his length from his trousers. When the flow of relief streamed free, he sighed and rolled his shoulders, which ached, and that’s when he finally saw the man occupying the urinal beside him. 

“I must really be bonked not to have noticed you,” Ellis said.

Stravinsky zipped himself up and walked to the sink. Ellis followed, washing his hands, but leaving them beneath the faucet longer than was necessary, losing himself in the cool whoosh of water. He looked up through his lank lock of hair hanging in his eyes, and met that increasingly familiar unfamiliar face in the mirror. His blue eyes looked grey in the dim light of the bathroom, and the dark circles beneath them were prominent and bagged. Ellis looked, he mused morbidly, like a corpse from his nightmares. 

A hand reached over to shut off the flow of water, stirring Ellis from his ghoulish reverie. He shuffled his feet and turned to the stormy Russian beside him offering a hand towel. When his hands were dry, Ellis waggled the cigarette between his lips and leaned forward, stumbling and falling into Stravinsky’s broad chest. The composer did his best to steady Ellis, and then brought out his pack of matches for the third time that night to light his cigarette, one for each of them this time. In unison, they inhaled the first dense drag, and then Ellis grabbed Stravinsky by the back of the neck and pulled his mouth roughly down against his own. 

It was less a kiss than a smoky grinding of lips, and it lasted only as long as it took for Stravinsky to push him away. Ellis staggered back, wide-eyed, as surprised by what he’d just done as Stravinsky looked to be. He couldn’t think of what to say so he continued to smoke his cigarette and stared at the tiled floor. Seconds later, after copious deep breaths of shock, he heard Stravinsky’s footsteps hastily exiting the bathroom. 

“Fuck,” Ellis sighed once he was alone. 

Sufficiently drunk, he decided it was time to call a cab. 

He wavered on groundless feet to the cobbled street and threw himself into the backseat of the car, somehow accomplishing the difficult recital of his address to the driver, and settling into the realization that he would spend yet another night too afraid to sleep and too drunk to keep his eyes open. Ellis pushed a finger against his lips. At least he had the memory of Stravinsky’s mouth against his own to keep him company.

\--

Later that night, or rather, later that very early morning, a multitude of city blocks away from Ellis, Igor Stravinsky sat at his piano, banging haplessly at the keys, sending a flurry of discord into the air to knock around the thin walls. His wife and children were sleeping and he was seething. “The Rite of Spring” had been a disaster. The party had been an abominable joke. He slammed his fists against the piano and bent his head low, listening to the failing tune as if for unknown secrets. Igor remained stuck in such a position until he was moved by an irrational thirst. Vodka sprung forth into his glass, and he fingered the matchbook in his pocket before bringing it out to ponder. When a match was pulled and struck, an image floated up from the mud of his mind: the man who had haunted the entire evening, his continuous presence coating the experience with a sticky sweetness that smelled of smoke and sulfur. 

Igor had first spotted the man when he’d entered the theatre and seen him twisting around in his seat, a pure face in a den of sparkling facades. He’d paid the face no mind until he met it again in the alley. Such a face, so vulnerably open and strategically closed, his mouth twitching constantly between smiles and frowns, his voice edged with a smooth hysteria. Such a face. Igor had thought on that face wondrously, after their parting, wondering if he might ever spy that likeness again. And then there it was once more, serendipitously appearing through a haze of cigarette smoke, and again, mashing against him in the bathroom. Igor downed his vodka in a single, stinging swallow and puffed at his cigarette. He sat down at the piano with that face curiously bright in his memory, and he began to play, his fingers lightly stroking, coaxing forth an easy melody, unhindered by any thought beyond vexing blue eyes and soft pink lips.


	2. Chapter 2

When the morning finally arrived, Ellis was sitting at his bedroom windowsill, shirtlessly sipping his third cup of tea and smoking his zillionth cigarette. His hair was already combed and his face was already scrubbed fresh and clean. He’d not slept, predictably. The drinking had done nothing to stall his terror, and after drifting off once, his head teetering into unconsciousness against the couch armrest, he had woken with a cry, for there, waiting for him with ragged flesh, had been the groping hands of the dead. 

The remainder of the night was spent pacing the room, its full expanse, from the front door to the fireplace and, always, back to his bar, where the brandy continued to fill him almost as much as the face he couldn’t manage to expel from his head. In fact, his head ached from the reminder, and the memory brought blood blooming up to color his cheeks for the first time in a long time. 

Ellis, the drunken fool, had kissed that damnable Russian composer in a bathroom like some dandy idiot. He cursed himself for a disastrous imbecile time and again, replaying the moment obsessively in his memory. What a prick, to have grabbed the man so by the neck, yanking him forward to slam against his lips. To think! The Parisians thought the Russian was the savage, when there Ellis had been, in all his English gentlemanliness, insinuating his mouth against the poor man like a depraved fiend. In his brittle-boned defense, he had been drunk as a skunk, but in pursuit of fairness, Ellis admitted to himself that he was often that level of inebriated, and so not entirely confident the play of events could be wholly blamed on alcohol. Inwardly, he felt the man’s face was ultimately at fault, for looking the way it did. Was Ellis to blame for the curve of Stravinsky’s lips or the way he clamped them over the end of his cigarette? Was Ellis to blame for the penetrating eyes and undeniable darkness shining within them? Not only had the man’s face coerced Ellis into kissing him, it had kept him on knife’s edge all night. 

After his tea was consumed, and his shirt, tie, and jacket were put on, Ellis decided he simply must have a breath of fresh air. But instead of the morning breeze banishing the persistent face from his thoughts, it only proved to lead Ellis in the direction of increased obsession, for he ended up stopped outside a music shop, and whose recording was being advertised in the window but the Russian’s. For a grown man, Ellis’ gulp of apprehension was comical, and his steps were guided by wobbly limbs as he steered his vessel inside the shop and held the record gently in his hands. That face stared up at him, black and white but just as unnerving, and it continued to stare at him until he purchased it and hid it away in a brown parcel. 

Let no one know how quickly Ellis retraced his steps back to the hotel, or how speedily he took the record from the bag, or how carefully he set it in his gramophone, for his enthusiasm at the prospect of listening to Stravinsky’s music again was shameful, the blush across his face embarrassing. His palms sweated as he aligned the needle, and his lungs withheld his breath until the first notes of “Petrushka” began to play. Upon the start of whirring flutes, Ellis felt his bones puddle, and he sank to the floor. The symphony stirred the space around him and he closed his eyes. Instead of dead, haunting sockets and reaching, rotting hands, Ellis saw that face, serious and, he decided in that very next moment, handsome, as he conducted the music rising from the gramophone speaker. Ellis grasped on to every note, every intoxicating pulse, until his head finally stopped throbbing and his heart steadied to a peaceful beat. He slipped into an airy, luxuriously calm sleep and did not wake until the rapping of knuckles assaulted his front door. 

Ellis’ eyes opened sleepily, and he rubbed them as he righted himself from the floor. The music had long ago stopped playing, but Ellis could hear it still, humming softly between his ears, and he let the alluring rhythm of it bring him to the doorknob, which he clutched with relaxed fingers and twisted. Standing in the hallway was Perkins. 

“You look like hell, Bartlett,” he said, pushing past Ellis and letting himself in. Ellis cocked an eyebrow at his friend with amusement, because for the first time in his immediate memory, Ellis felt well rested and - dare he risk saying it? – content. Oh, what a few hours of interrupted sleep could accomplish!

“What can I do you for, Perkins?” Ellis inquired, following Perkins into the sitting room, where he was already pouring them both a short glass of brandy. 

“I’m going to throw you a party,” Perkins announced, pushing the glass into Ellis’ hand. 

“A party?” Ellis asked. “Whatever for?”

“Your birthday, of course,” answered Perkins. He sat on the pink velvet armchair and waved his drink at Ellis, summoning him to sit on the couch. 

Ellis sat, but his face was wrinkled with bemusement. “But it’s not my birthday for ages.”

“No one needs to know that,” Perkins scoffed. “I want to throw a big party, and your birthday is as good an excuse as any.”

“You want to high-jack the celebration of my birth to assuage your own selfish amusements, and you expect me to go along with it?”

“I absolutely expect it,” laughed Perkins. “We will throw it here and people will bring gifts. It will give me an excuse to wear that tie, you know the one? Oh, let’s do it, Bartlett. We’ll have so less far to stagger at the end of the night if the party is in our own domain. There can be dancing and music. We could hire that piano player from the bar last night. He was spiffy, don’t you think?”

Possessed with instant interest, Ellis heard himself say, “What about that Russian fellow?”

Perkins balanced his glass on his knee and frowned. “Stravinsky, you mean?”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“What about Stravinsky?”

“We can hire him to play at the party,” Ellis said. 

“Hire Igor Stravinsky to play at your birthday party?!” laughed Perkins in an uproar of mocking whoops. “That sullen, dank savage?”

Ellis shrugged his shoulders as if he didn’t care, as if his heart wasn’t exploding in his chest at the mere idea. “Have it your way. I just thought his presence at the party might bring around more guests, considering what an uproar he made last night. But if you want our party to be just the same as everyone else’s, by all means, Perkins, let’s get that piano player from last night to play. I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

As easily as that, Perkins was adamant about attaining Igor Stravinsky for the entertainment. He wrote up a letter of request right then and there, both himself and Ellis signing their names at the bottom of the stationary before sending it along with the hotel’s messenger boy. 

They waited together for the rest of the afternoon, chatting and planning. Ellis tried not to let on to his nervousness as they awaited Stravinsky’s response. Half of him was positive their request would be turned down flat, considering what had transpired between the two men last night. But the other half thought that maybe, just maybe…

When the messenger returned some hours later, Ellis was quick to jump from his seat and greet him at the door. He took the reply from him with a polite smile, paid him, and sent him on his way, then turned to Perkins, who ripped the folded paper from Ellis’ hands and proceeded to read it with increasingly exercised eyelids.

“Well, what does he say?” Ellis asked, irritated.

Perkins looked up at Ellis with a smirk. “He says it would be his pleasure to play at your birthday party.”

\--

The next week passed like a dream, and every night before bed, Ellis put on Stravinsky’s record and let it lull him to sleep. He had no nightmares when that music was playing, and he had a mind that it was the joltingly strange Russian composition scaring away the accusing eyes of the dead that cleared his psyche for a stretch of uninterrupted rest. By the week’s end, Ellis’ dark circles were faded, and the bags beneath his eyes were smooth. His lips and cheeks were flushed with a youthful flow of blood, and his hair felt thicker where it lay in a clean, diagonal sweep across his forehead. 

On the night of the party, Ellis was freshly stepped from his bath, his shirt unbuttoned and clinging to his wet chest when he opened the front door at the first knock. He did not check his appearance before opening the door because he assumed it would be Perkins, arriving early to get sloshed before the guests began to pour in, but it was definitely not Perkins standing there severely when Ellis threw open the door. 

“You’re very early,” Ellis said stupidly after staring for an obscene amount of time at the shadow of Igor Stravinsky in his hallway. “Please, come in.” He stepped aside and held out his hand invitingly. Stravinsky stepped over the threshold and halted right in front of Ellis, who had become uncomfortably aware of the blush spreading across his chest, his exposed chest, still dripping from the bath. 

“I always arrive early to test the instrument,” Stravinsky said. 

“Of course,” Ellis said. “It’s no trouble. Let me show you to the piano.” 

“Thank you.”

Stravinsky followed behind Ellis as he led them through the foyer. The piano was sitting by the floor-to-ceiling windows on the far side of the sitting room. Perkins and Ellis had pushed the furniture against the walls, clearing plenty of space for dancing, and Stravinsky looked about the space with a blank look, then sat at the piano bench and ran his hands over the keys. 

“I made sure it was tuned,” Ellis provided. 

Stravinsky cut him a look like silver and began his onslaught of pedal pushing and note pounding. Ellis was struck frozen as the music burst through him like a shot. His hand flattened against the top of the piano and he leaned his weight against it, tipping his head to listen. He’d not heard the tune before and his eyes were so taught to shut at Stravinsky’s music that he was scarcely aware they were closed until the music suddenly stopped. 

“A new piece,” Stravinsky said, and Ellis opened his eyes at the rawness of his voice. 

Stravinsky was looking up at him behind those glasses, with such an expression on his face, Ellis was compelled to step forward and speak to keep the sight in his view. “It’s unusual,” he said.

“It is unfinished,” Stravinsky said, and Ellis watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down in his throat as he swallowed. 

“I like it,” Ellis continued. 

“What about it do you like?” Stravinsky asked, the question throwing Ellis completely off guard. He recovered by busying his hands with the lighting of a fresh cigarette, making a show of pulling out his own book of matches and smiling. 

“It’s not like anything else,” Ellis began thoughtfully. “Instead of a melody, it’s more like the chasing of one. Unpredictable. Complicated.” He exhaled slowly and turned his head away, feeling foolish to be speaking his opinion to a musical genius. “I don’t know much about music, I’m afraid.” 

Ellis felt the gaze on his back, and he turned to face Stravinsky again, who was sitting still as a statue. He wondered if the man was awaiting an apology for Ellis’ behavior the other night, or at the very least an explanation. He knew he should give one, but he couldn’t suffer the words to form in his mouth, and when Stravinsky himself finally licked his lips and breathed in to speak, another knock sounded at the front door and Perkins stomped into the room with a bottle of champagne in each hand. 

“Bartlett! Oh, your Russian is here. How wonderful! Let’s have a drink!” 

Immediately, Ellis looked to gauge Stravinsky’s reaction to the title of ‘your Russian,’ as if Ellis had called ownership over him. But his face had already returned to its glowering default, and he turned his head downward, lightly caressing the keys to bring forth a simple tune while Ellis and Perkins shared in their first toast of the evening.

The night deepened, as it perpetually insisted on doing, and the guests arrived. One drink turned into several, turned into too many, probably, and as the party raged around him, Ellis kept his eyes squared on the piano and the man hunched over it, playing a steady stream of sound. Some of it he recognized as pieces from “Petrushka,” and it made him smile. During one such smile, Stravinsky glanced up and looked straight at Ellis. The smile fell from Ellis’ face, but he could not pull away his eyes, and Stravinsky held him there beneath that anchored look until the cigarette between Ellis’ fingers burned so low it singed his skin. The shock of pain worked to restart his brain, and Ellis retreated from his Russian’s stare and made it his duty for the rest of the party to get ridiculously drunk. Then maybe his eyes would be too unfocused for even Stravinsky to bewilder.

If a party is to be judged by the consumption of alcohol and the amount of ash in the ashtrays, then Perkins and Ellis’ birthday bash was nothing short of a raging success, and after they’d shoved the last of the attendees out the door well past two in the morning, Perkins muttered something about birthdays and having the good grace to age respectably, and Ellis was too hammered to remind his friend it was not actually his birthday and ushered him out the door with a laugh. He strode straight to the bathroom, once he was alone, to splash his face with water, but when he reentered the expired party room, he nearly jumped out of his skin, because he wasn’t alone at all. One man still remained, cracking his knuckles beside the piano. And as Ellis would be a poor narrator for the following occurrences, let the immediate events be told from a sober mind. 

Igor watched the man stumble from the bathroom, his tie long since pulled from around his throat and his hair a mess. It was a similar picture to the one presented to him a week ago, after the ballet, though there was now an undeniable difference in the look of the eyes. They were swimming in alcohol, true, but they were brighter, less tortured, and when a smile split the Englishman’s lips, his face radiated with an unprecedented warmth of unknown origin. 

“I’m sorry,” Ellis blurted. “I fear I’m veritably beside myself with drink.” 

As if to prove his declaration, he fell forward, landing with a thud on his knees. Igor flew to his side to assist him, helping him up with strong arms that wound beneath the bend of his elbows. Ellis proved to be quite light, and Igor struggled little to lay him on one of the couches. The drunken man’s head lolled to the side, his eyes fluttering open in their attempt to focus on the world. 

“Petrushka,” Ellis muttered, so low that Igor had to lean closer. “Petrushka,” Ellis repeated, his hands coming up to cling to Igor’s shirt, rumpling it beneath his tightening fingers and pulling it untucked. 

The word made Igor rumple his brow. “What of Petrushka?” he asked the man quickly sliding away from consciousness. 

“Please, turn it on,” Ellis said, no, begged, his hands running freely up and down Igor’s chest. “I can’t sleep without it. My nightmares.” 

Igor extricated himself from Ellis’ hands and located the gramophone sitting close on a pushed aside table. He could see the recording already in place and simply lined up the needle and turned it on. And then his own music was floating through the room. Swift was his turn back to Ellis, whose eyes were already closed, his face a peaceful painting. Igor made his way back to his side and sat on the floor next to the couch. With no social constraints to restrain him, he stared openly at the man’s slumbering face. 

Over the last week, Igor had wondered whether his imagination had exaggerated the features, and now that he was free to examine them closely, he accepted that his memory had actually succeeded in lessening the beauty of the man’s face. As Igor explored it slowly with transfixed eyes, he saw it for what it was, and that was nothing short of perfect. If closely observed, Ellis’ face was almost feminine in its soft, cascading lines. Igor followed the cunning slope of his nose with an imagined fingertip. Even the asymmetrical flare of his nostrils was something to behold, let alone the lips beneath his thick mustache. The upper lip was full and pink with triangled peaks. The lower lip was thinner, but hypnotizing as the sleeping man lightly sucked it between his teeth in his slumber. The straight line of his mouth led to the smooth plane of his cheeks, shaved to best showcase a wide, square jaw. Between his dark eyebrows, above his closed eyes, creases dipped into the skin, leaving a faint signature of distress to haunt his otherwise serene expression. His hair was mussed and obscuring the delicate curve of his forehead, so Igor reached out his hand and carefully, very carefully, swept the hair to the side, letting his fingertips linger for a moment on warm skin. 

Ellis shifted in his sleep at the gentle touch and Igor pulled his hand away. He sat there, ingraining that face into his mind until the record stopped playing. Then he stood, walked to the gramophone, and set it back from the beginning. 

\--

Ellis didn’t stir from his sleep until well past noon. He stretched his arms above his head and yawned, surprised to find himself strewn on the couch like a bohemian heathen. No bother. It wasn’t the first time he’d woken outside of his bed. He was only glad he’d managed to sleep at all. As he sat up, he thanked his drunken self for maintaining the good sense to set his record to playing before he passed out, then he stood and trudged to the kitchen to put on a kettle for tea. Something caught his eye, however, on his trek, and he stopped in his tracks beside his gramophone. Lying atop it was a folded sheet of paper. Ellis frowned and picked it up. It came close to fluttering from his grasp when he opened it and saw who it was from. 

‘Mr. Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett (so it was written in shiny black ink), 

I will be composing on the evening of the twelfth at seven o’clock. In light of your musical interests, I cordially invite you to attend. The ballroom at the Grand. 

-Igor Stravinsky’

Ellis replaced the note where he’d found it and finished his walk to the kettle, where he set it to boiling and leaned against the counter. He lit a cigarette and puffed on it thoughtfully. That very evening would be the evening of the twelfth, and a quick check of his pocket watch informed him that seven o’clock was only a handful of hours away. It was strange, the erratic beating of his heart, and he found its rhythm only increased as he penned his quick response and called upon a boy at the hotel to deliver it. 

\--

When Ellis walked into the ballroom at seven o’clock sharp, his steps echoed, and he was startled to see the expansive space empty save himself and, all the way on the other side of the room, the piano upon which Stravinsky leaned. Circumstance was positioned in such a way that Ellis had to walk across the length of the room while the Russian did nothing but stand there and watch his approach. 

It felt like it took ages for Ellis to reach him, but finally he did, and when he stopped a few feet shy of Stravinsky, the composer turned away from him to sit down at the piano. Ellis shifted his weight uncertainly until Stravinsky said, “Sit.”

There, pushed a little ways from the instrument, was a chair, and Ellis sat on it obligingly, crossing his legs and settling his hands politely in his lap. Stravinsky was staring at him through his round-rimmed spectacles, and Ellis waited for him to speak, but no words came. Instead, the composer’s fingers began to spread across the keys. It was the same piece he’d played for Ellis the night before, the unfinished one that had sent Ellis’ head to spinning with fascination, and the effect was no less now. Louder in the empty ballroom than in Ellis’ hotel suite, the notes resonated wild and thick in his eardrums. He leaned forward in his allotted chair, listening carefully. For Stravinsky’s part, he did not look away from his guest, but gazed unalterably. He did not need to see the keys he stroked, only the face before him. 

Had Ellis not been so entrenched in the rapture of Stravinsky’s playing, he might have found it uncomfortable, the way the man’s eyes never left his, but he was adrift on the steady stream of sound, and he met Stravinsky’s gaze with equal heat that fastened their attentions together. Trance-like, they sat, one composing, one inspiring, and neither could say how long it passed that way - an hour, perhaps, or two – but when Stravinsky finally took his fingers from the ivories, Ellis felt dizzy and drained. He swallowed and his throat was dry. He blinked and his eyes burned. 

Both men drank in the silence, vulnerable in the aftermath of whatever had just transpired between them, until Ellis cleared his throat and deigned it time to speak. 

“It’s fascinating to me,” he said. His voice sounded oddly broken. 

“It’s about you,” Stravinsky answered, a challenge. 

Ellis laughed softly. “That’s good.” His hands fidgeted in his lap. “Your music, it sounds like the inside of my head.”

Stravinsky stood, and for the first time Ellis noticed the flat parcel sitting on the piano bench. Ellis stood as Stravinsky picked up the parcel and walked to his chair, holding the parcel out for Ellis to take between delicate fingers. 

“What is this?” Ellis asked. 

“Something to help you sleep,” Stravinsky answered, and then Ellis remembered the night before, and the memory twisted his stomach. How he had fallen in his stupor, how Stravinsky had lifted him and placed him on the couch, how he’d begged him to turn on the music. 

Ellis felt dirtied, as if he’d been caught doing something bad, and he suddenly couldn’t handle the weight of Stravinsky’s eyes or the curve of his lush mouth, so he looked down to study his shoes as he reached in his pockets for his cigarette case. His other hand held the parcel tight. 

A hand wrapped around Ellis’ wrist and stilled him. He felt the building heat between them as he lifted his eyes, and Stravinsky was right there, looking down at him beneath the spectacles perched on the tip of his nose.

“I’m giving a small concert tomorrow,” Stravinsky said. He was so close, Ellis felt the tickle of warm breath on his face. His wrist was still trapped in a hot, firm grip, his blood pumping quick beneath his skin. “Will you come?”

Ellis swallowed hard, his gulp embarrassingly audible. “Of course,” he answered with a hitched breath. 

Stravinsky’s fingers tightened around his wrist and Ellis felt himself pulled closer as if by gravity itself, until their faces were held at such proximity that, were one to tilt and lean only slightly, their lips would brush together in a kiss. Ellis sighed and Stravinsky – Igor – inhaled sharply, breathing in his air, and then he pushed Ellis gently away, and the men separated. 

“I will send along a note with the address,” Stravinsky said. He pushed his spectacles up on his nose. 

“Alright,” Ellis said, and then it was his turn to watch as Igor nodded, then turned to swiftly walk from the ballroom. With enormous eyes, Ellis tracked the tall, lean figure until it disappeared through the archway. He clutched the parcel in his arms and closed his eyes, waiting for his chest to stop heaving before he, too, exited the ballroom.

\--

Igor Stravinsky did send along a note; Ellis propped it beside his gramophone when it arrived the next morning, and lay down on the floor as his new record spun. When Ellis had arrived home, he’d torn open the parcel paper and found, shining and grand beneath, a new record for his gramophone of Stravinsky’s piano playing. He’d scooted the table with the gramophone into his bedroom and slept wonderfully well, and now he listened to it again. Lifting up on an elbow, Ellis ate a bite of his toast, crunching loudly as the notes jangled jauntily throughout the room. 

That night, he would attend the concert, as requested. Ellis yearned for the music to engulf him, anticipated the rough caress of jolts and melodic manipulation that seemed to pour effortlessly from Igor Stravinsky’s fingertips. He imagined the intimacy of the occasion. The location of the concert was to be a smallish theatre, and Stravinsky’s sole accompaniment would be his piano. His piano and his brilliant mind that commanded such impossible music as to set Ellis’ skin afire. Already, his face blazed and he patted it dry with a dab of his handkerchief. Never in his life, full as it was with considerable achievement and adventure, had Ellis felt such a pleasantly strong throbbing in his veins. 

Suddenly, his thoughts returned to The Event, the joining of his mouth to Stravinsky’s. How strange a thing, a kiss. To place one’s lips against another’s, and to what end? To press together, soft and firm, and feel the other’s body heat, and inhale the other’s breath? Ellis had kissed – and had been kissed – too many times to count. Upon his brow, upon his cheeks, upon his mouth and neck and cock. It was a basic sort of thing, an unexceptional action on most accounts. And yet…and yet. With thought of Igor Stravinsky’s mouth, Ellis could not categorize it amongst his plethora of kisses past. Those lips were not the generic lips of another female for another night, nor were they even the lips of a formerly cherished mouth, of Gwendoline’s, thought so incomparable in its day and now, miraculously, lacking. Stravinsky’s lips, their taste, their structure, their warmth, even pushed into a kiss against their wish, their memory burned him, burned in him. And Ellis was slave to their memory, scattered on his carpet, awash in sound and feverish from the thought of the few seconds when those lips were meeting his own. How strange a thing, a kiss. And to kiss a man like Igor Stravinsky. What a thing! 

And what if, thought Ellis, it were to happen again? Clearly – or so Ellis gathered from the unresponsiveness following the first kiss – Stravinsky had not been offended to the point of banishing Ellis from his company. Quite contrarily, he had sought for more of Ellis’ company since that kiss. How was that to be taken? If Ellis were to trip, perhaps, or stumble into Stravinsky’s arms – purely by accident, mind – would it be welcome? Were Ellis to seek those lips again, mashing them against his own roughly, or brushing them gently, would it be allowed? Would, if already in his arms, Ellis dared to stay, to kiss him longer, deeper, and with increased purpose, would Stravinsky push him away and glare at him with those eyes, thinning his mouth in a cruel, straight line, or would he pull him closer, parting Ellis’ lips with the tip of his tongue? 

Ellis glanced at his pocket watch and was pleased to find he had hours left to think over these matters. He stretched his body long across the floor and resigned himself to the replaying of that kiss, over and over, until the idea of it felt more like a dream than something that had actually happened, and then he shut his eyes to rest a bit, and dreamed it all the while. 

\--

He wore his best shirt, best vest, best coat, best hat, best shoes, and on his arm hanged the best date he could arrange at such short notice, the little redhead from the ballet. They arrived to the theatre earlier than was admittedly fashionable. Viola – or so he thought he remembered her name to be – and Ellis were one of the first couples to arrive, in fact, and as he had hoped, Igor Stravinsky was flitting about the venue with a scowl. As they approached, Ellis heard him growl, to a waifish man who must have been his assistant, that the piano was not, to his reckoning, in tune, and that, were it not tuned to his satisfaction, he would not play at all. Ellis caught his eye after that, thinking the sight of him might cheer Stravinsky’s stern brow, and for a moment, incredibly, it did. Stravinsky’s dark eyes flashed luminously behind his spectacles and his lips tugged into a miniscule smile, and for one second, maybe two, he appeared happy, happy to see Ellis, but then his gaze flickered to Ellis’ side, and his expression clouded instantly. It was, to Ellis, as though the sun had just eclipsed, and when he opened his mouth to greet the composer, Stravinsky whipped his head in the opposite direction and stalked away. 

“A moody, strange man,” Viola commented in hushed tones at Ellis’ ear. 

Ellis frowned, flabbergasted by that most unexpected of exchanges, and insisted to Viola they claim their seats at once. He wanted to sit in the very front row, to be as close as possible to the man as he played. He wanted to catch every detail, every strain of the Russian’s back as he bent forward over the keys, every puff of breath that stirred from his concentrated mouth. 

They found their seats, front and center, and waited. It did not take long for the humble theatre to fill, nor for Igor Stravinsky to appear on the stage in a swooping of black evening attire and slicked hair and an intense frown, and take his place at the piano bench like a king to his throne. Ellis admitted to himself, when the man began to bang away at his keys, that he had expected Stravinsky to look at him, the way he had done before, and when he did not, when he, in fact, seemed to intentionally avoid looking at Ellis altogether, Ellis was staggered and disappointed. The dream had been dashed, after all his imaginings, that Stravinsky would play as if Ellis were the only one in the room, in the world, and that they would fall into a dreamy zone, as they had before. It did not occur in that fashion, not even slightly. 

The music still transported him, still moved him in his heart. He still leaned forward in his seat, like a magnet toward an attracting force. He still ignored everything else in the room but Stravinsky and Stravinsky’s sound and being, even when his date tapped his shoulder and tried to whisper idle gossip at him. The time slid by, quick as a bullet, and soon the lights were coming back up to full flush, and Stravinsky nodded once to the audience before storming backstage. 

After the completion of the concert, Viola professed she had a desire for cocktails and dancing – how yawnably predictable – but Ellis informed her he must speak with the artist before they disembarked, and so, after pecking her hand and disposing of her company amongst a group of smoking chatterers, he headed backstage. He found a door at the end of a dimly lit hall, a temporary name in a temporary slot. ‘Stravinsky,’ it read, and Ellis knocked on it lightly.

At first, there was no response, so Ellis knocked again. The door flew open so suddenly Ellis jumped back to keep from being hit. Standing in the doorway with a fearsome face was Igor Stravinsky, and he very nearly smoldered at the sight of Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett.

“Hello,” Ellis said, quite unsure of himself, and for good reason. The other man was so serious in his grimace that, for a moment, Ellis wondered if he hadn’t made some grievous mistake by coming, if he hadn’t misconstrued some hidden signal. Why, oh why, would the man be so negatively moved by Ellis’ presence? Had not he requested it personally? The confusion had him miserable, and he found himself entering the room without invitation and shutting the door at his back. Still, the man stared angrily, practically shaking with fury, and Ellis could do nothing but step even closer and tilt his head to look him straight in the eyes, only a foot of space and a layer of spectacles between them. 

“Stravinsky,” he said in his softest tone to no response but a clenching jaw and narrowing eyes. “Igor,” he tried, holding out his hand, to do what with he could not say, but he held it out and it touched the stiff cloth of Stravinsky’s collar, and that was what did it. Stravinsky slapped away his hand, and Ellis gasped from the shock of it. “What is it?” Ellis heard himself say. “What has you so unlike yourself that you would strike at me?”

“How dare you presume to know my nature!” Stravinsky yelled, his rage a booming tempest in his chest. 

“Is your nature to slap away my hand?” asked Ellis, his own voice rising with ire. He lifted his hand again and purposefully touched Stravinsky’s shoulder. 

“Do not touch me,” the Russian spat, and Ellis tightened his fingers over that shoulder, gripping him hard, impossibly irritated now, and embarrassed. He clutched the shoulder roughly enough to bruise, hoping it would bruise, and Stravinsky slapped him across his face so hard his cheek was turned, but Ellis did not release his shoulder and did not step away. Stravinsky slapped him again, and Ellis grabbed his wrist. 

“What is this?” Ellis asked, shifting his voice from the height of disagreeableness to a snarling volume of intimate speech. He did not release the man’s shoulder or wrist.

Igor Stravinsky stared at him as no one had stared at him before, and then he spoke a question so quietly, so faintly, that Ellis would not have heard it at all were he not so tuned to that raging man’s frequency. “Where is she?” 

“Where is who?” asked Ellis, beyond confused. 

“Your woman,” hissed Stravinsky. 

“My date, you mean?” asked Ellis. “What has she to do with any of this?”

Stravinsky’s response was nothing but a continued, heated stare, and Ellis released him then, and took a step away. Following that receding step, a realization dawned on him that the reason for Stravinsky’s outburst may very well have everything to do with his date, with Viola, whom he cared nothing for and had already forgotten as soon as he’d vanished her from his sight. It was Stravinsky he’d wanted in his sight, and who was in front of him now, and whom he would be wishing was in front of him later. But Stravinsky, he wagered, had not guessed such a thing and did not know. He hastened to tell him forthwith, but the formation of such words had him scrambling for purchase on his nerves. 

“It would have been inappropriate for me to come here unattended,” Ellis said. 

“I do not care what you do,” Stravinsky said. He turned from him. “Only that you go.”

“You’re angry that I brought someone,” Ellis said, letting his aggravation seep into his words. “You’re jealous.”

“Get out.”

“Why are you jealous?” 

“Get out.”

“Igor, I - ”

Stravinsky came upon him, then, in all his ferocity, backing him up to the door until he slammed against it painfully hard. Stravinsky’s hands boxed him in violently, and he lowered his face to Ellis’. “Get. Out.” 

His whispered words were full of vile, and Ellis trembled beneath them, so close to the lips he’d longed to kiss again, and unable to move forward, frozen with fear. How horribly he had misjudged everything. 

He had no choice but to nod, and Stravinsky lifted away from him and opened the door. Ellis turned and stepped through it without a second glance at the Russian he had begun to think of, stupidly, as his. 

\--

That night, in a chain of events that would surprise no one, Ellis had more to drink than he should have. But what, in his peculiar situation, in his hobbled state of mind, was he to do? He had sent Viola home in a cab alone. When she had asked him why his cheek was inflamed and why his eyes were wet and why he couldn’t seem to catch his breath, he’d been snappish and rude, but he was relieved to get rid of her. 

He had walked the whole way home, stopping for cigarettes and a fresh bottle of brandy, and when he had arrived at the hotel, he poured himself drink after drink. He could not bear to play his recordings, knew he would find no comfort in them, so he filled himself with alcohol instead of music, with prayerful thoughts that maybe he would sleep if were drunk enough. Where a wiser soul might have known it would not work, Ellis did not, and as he grew more inebriated, he grew more and more morose, until he was mad with the feeling. Around midnight, he clasped his overcoat over his shoulders and set out with grim determination. 

Ellis knew where he was staying from the address on the note, and he walked there, shuffling on drunken feet, until at last there was a door beneath his pounding fist. He lurched against it in a pathetic collapse of limbs and felt his body slip slowly down, until he was a pile upon the doormat. Still, he banged his fist, until the door finally crept open, and a skittish, shining set of eyes peered out at him from the dark. 

It was a woman, Ellis conceived blurrily, and she disappeared as quickly as she’d appeared, gasping softly before promptly shutting the door. Ellis felt up the door until he grasped the knob, and managed to pull himself to his feet just as the door was reopening. And there, dressed for bed and utterly shocked, was Igor Stravinsky. He grabbed hold of Ellis by both shoulders and led him away from his doorstep, propping his drunken, lax body against the wall and glancing over his shoulder at the front door. The woman stood there watching. Ellis heard their quick, Russian exchanges, and then the woman closed the door and they were alone. 

Ellis felt himself smile. “Your wife,” he slurred at the composer, who was, in that moment, absent of composure. 

Stravinsky shook Ellis’ shoulders angrily. “Yes, my wife. Of course, my wife. What are you doing here?” 

He looked so soft, Ellis thought, in the warm glow of the streetlamp and his loose fitting bed shirt. He looked so undone, his hair hanging in his eyes, uncombed. Ellis began to sink against the wall just to feel the strength of Stravinsky keep him upright. 

“Why are you here?” Stravinsky asked again, and the change of tone, despite his drink-sloshed brain, did not go unnoticed by Ellis.

To be certain, those eyes were just as intense as they were before, but there was something new to them now that could not be missed. Concern? Ellis pushed off the wall to look closer, and they both stumbled backwards a step, Stravinsky’s hands wrapping around Ellis’ waist to keep him steady. Ellis gazed up at him and laughed when he finally noticed. He was not wearing those round little spectacles. Ellis could clearly see his eyes, unhindered by the reflective glass circles, and he saw as those amber eyes grew huge and dark with pupil. The hold around his waist tightened insistently and Ellis was jarred to attention. Why was he there? Why had he come? 

“I’ve decided that I’m leaving Paris,” Ellis said, the decision coming to him as he spoke it. He placed his hands over Stravinsky’s shirt to feel if it was as soft as it looked. It was, and he gathered the fabric between his fingers, mindless of his own intent. “I’m leaving,” he said again, looking at the man before him eagerly, hopefully. Hoping for what, he had no idea. “There’s nothing for me here.” He blinked, took a shuddering breath, swallowed hard, and licked his lips. “Is there?”

Stravinsky stared him down, his face an astounding thing, a rainbow of expressions so hidden Ellis could not begin to discern a single one. His liquor-brave eyes roamed over that face, stopping at those lips, which were held slightly apart for quickened breath. With a bolt of confidence, Ellis tilted his head and brought himself closer to those lips. Stravinsky held still, his eyes wide and unsure, but his fingers dug into Ellis’ side, subconsciously tugging him nearer. They were pushed so together, it would be such a simple, easy thing, to finish the distance between them, and, for a moment, Ellis thought it might be possible, and he closed his eyes and waited. He felt the exhale of breath as Igor came close enough for his mustache to tickle Ellis’ cheek, but then it went away, and then it all went away as Stravinsky let go of him and stepped back. Ellis wavered on his feet, but did not fall. He watched as the solemn mask slipped back over Stravinsky’s features, smoothing his brow and straightening his unkissable lips. 

“Why should I care if you remain in Paris?” Stravinsky asked nonchalantly, or, if not with nonchalance, then with a minute level of irritation and a toxic level of coldness.

Ellis’ chest felt like it was being squeezed tight by murderous claws, and he staggered back and hit the wall. He let himself fall to the ground. And this time, so did Stravinsky. 

\--

Perkins assisted his friend when he announced at brunch the next day that he was ready to leave Paris and move on with his life. “It’s time I go back to London, I think,” Ellis had explained while puffing lightly on his cigarette. Perkins had voiced his sadness at Ellis’ departure, but claimed he understood completely, and would Ellis please leave him with the numbers of a few of those lovely women he’d entertained himself with during his stay in Paris?

Packing took hardly any time at all. He gave Perkins the gramophone - he would be playing no music on it anytime soon - but when his friend had inquired where his records were that went with it, Ellis had said, with an inconspicuous shrug, that they had disappeared after his ‘birthday party,’ and that had been the end of it, but the two Stravinsky records remained protectively nestled in a sweater at the very bottom of his suitcase. He would not listen to them, but neither could he tolerate their absence completely. They weighed heavily in his case and mind as he made his way to the cab on the afternoon of his farewell. 

He kissed Perkins on the cheek, accepted a kiss of his own, and then slid into the backseat of the cab. The drive to the train station was a quick one, and the train ride was spent casting solemn looks out his window. Ellis was not a happy man, and he did not look forward to his return to London. In all honesty, he found himself looking forward to nothing at all. 

But his apartment in the city was the same as it had always been, and he supposed he was luckier than most to have a home to return to after time away. He was not without a nest of his own wealth, he reminded himself. Ellis had, after all, been very successful in his career, and his apartment was a reflection of those accomplishments. Plaques decorated his walls, awards for his outstanding achievements in journalism. Framed pictures of himself with his famous friends. Oh! How important Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett was. How respected. How content he must be.

Needless to say, in a haunted mind with no safe haven, Ellis turned quickly to his cold comforts. He did not leave his apartment. He drank himself silly and spent his nights shaking on the floor. His dreams were tainted by nightmares, an agony of dead faces and those damned rotting hands, reaching for him, grabbing him, dragging him down into the dirt where he belonged, where he should have ended up. The reminders on the walls made it worse, and he tore down all the pictures that first night home. He wanted no reminders of Gallipoli, needed no reminders. 

Something Ellis did not turn to was companionship. He pondered a hired whore, but the thought made him sick. To pay someone to sweat upon, only to wake them screaming and crying in the middle of the night? It was no option, and he made no attempt of it. There was no longer an interest for him there. The only thing that interested Ellis was the bottom of his bottle, which he constantly pursued. 

One night, perhaps at the end of his first week back in London, Ellis was so drunk he could not hear the knock on his door. He was so drunk he could not hear the pounding that followed. Ellis was so drunk he had not bothered to lock his door and was in the middle of lighting a cigarette backwards when someone decided to just let themselves in. 

Igor Stravinsky, whose recollection must now be followed to attest to the unfolding of the following scene, found him at the kitchen table with his backwards lit smoke dangling from his slack mouth. Ellis’ hair, a week unwashed, was greasy and wild, and his usual mustache was joined by thick scruff sprouting over his jaw and chin. His eyes were half-closed and red, with great grey rings around them. Stravinsky kneeled at his side, and Ellis was so gone, he hardly processed the newcomer’s presence. When Stravinsky plucked the cigarette from Ellis’ mouth and put it out in the ashtray, Ellis looked up, and his eyes rolled to the back of his head and he tumbled forward, out of his chair and into Stravinsky’s lap. 

“Ellis?” Stravinsky asked, combing the dirty hair with his fingers, pushing it off Ellis’ clammy forehead. 

Ellis’ eyes fluttered and he coughed, and when Stravinsky picked him up from the floor, his head rolled heavily on his neck, and Stravinsky had to support one hand beneath his neck and one beneath his knees as he carried him from the kitchen to the bedroom. 

Stravinsky assessed him with his eyes before laying hands upon him. He did not touch the shirt or trousers, but removed the socks and set a blanket over him. He thought Ellis so drunk he had passed out, but when he lifted off his knees to fetch a glass of water, a whimper made him stop. 

Ellis thrashed on the bed. He whimpered again, a horrific noise, weak and pathetic and helpless. Stravinsky took his hand in his and listened for a moment while Ellis cried out, while his chest heaved and lungs wheezed with labored breath. Stravinsky set a warm palm against Ellis’ cheek, the same cheek he’d slapped in his temper. 

“Ellis?” Stravinsky whispered, and though Ellis did not fully wake up, his terror seemed to end for a moment, and his closed lids, squeezed so tight, seemed to relax. Stravinsky recalled Ellis’ request on that other night that felt so far away, when he’d been too drunk and Stravinsky had laid him down. He had wanted, begged for, music. Stravinsky glanced around the room. He stood up and, reluctantly, left Ellis’ side to search through the apartment for the gramophone. Unsuccessful, he returned to the bedroom to an Ellis already returned to his distress, and Igor only knew one thing he could do. 

He sat beside Ellis on the bed, took up his hand once more, and began to hum. It was a simple melody, something quaint and untextured, but he hummed it deep and steady, and Ellis, even in unconsciousness, leaned his head toward it as if by magic. Igor watched and hummed as Ellis calmed beside him. He hummed until Ellis was deep asleep, and peacefully so, and then he took off his glasses and set them on the side table. He lay down beside Ellis, keeping his hand firm in his, and continued to hum softly in his ear until he, too, fell asleep.


	3. Chapter 3

Ellis awoke with the dawn and a dawning suspicion that something monumental had shifted in the night, but because of his sickly brain, so soaked with alcohol, he could not, for the life of him, remember what it could be – until his eyelids fluttered open, a tiny slit, and spied the solid form lying beside him. At first, Ellis would admit later on, he had thought him a vision, a figment of his tortured soul, because the sleeping figure tucked in the bed, pressed against his side, could not be real. Stravinsky’s hair could not be untucked and sweeping across his forehead, so near to Ellis that, with a single puff of breath, the dark strands poofed up and then fell softly into place. He could not be so close that were Ellis to stretch his fingers they would brush across Stravinsky’s thigh. It could not be. And so, when Igor Stravinsky – or his fantastical mirage – opened his eyes and looked at Ellis, and the smallest of smiles teased the edges of that plump and perfect mouth, Ellis could not speak. 

When Igor – because if he were to be imagined, Ellis could call him whatever he desired – closed his large, warm hand around Ellis’ and squeezed gently, Ellis still could not speak, but he allowed his body to be shifted into sitting upon the mattress, and he was supple-boned and malleable when Igor’s hands settled beneath his arms and lifted him from the bed altogether. Somehow he was standing, his feet firm on the soft carpet, and Igor was in front of him, his hands combing the greasy strands out of Ellis’ foggy, drunken eyes, that serious look fostered in his gaze. Without a word from either of them, Igor’s hand returned to entwine with his, and he followed as Igor led him out of the bedroom, down the hall, and into the bathroom, where he directed Ellis to sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, while Igor himself began to fill the tub with steamy water. 

The sound of rushing water filled Ellis’ ears and washed some of the haze from his head, so much so that, when Igor returned to his side, kneeling before him to study his face, Ellis was capable of focusing fully for the first time. He reached out a hand and touched Igor’s cheek, just for a second, before returning it awkwardly to his lap. Igor didn’t speak, only stood and, upon standing, held his hand out for Ellis. The hand was accepted swiftly, and Ellis was back to standing on his feet, having no choice but to keep his hands braced against Igor’s shoulders as he was undressed. Igor’s fingers, long and gentle, traced down Ellis’ chest, slowly unbuttoning every button crossed - and those were many - until the shirt, wrinkled and booze-stained, was opened, revealing the pale skin beneath. Ellis did have to find his own balance then, as Igor pulled the shirt from his shoulders and down his arms, until his entire torso was bared. 

There was a moment, or, rather, a succession of moments, wherein Ellis dragged his clumsy fingertips uncertainly over his belt buckle, wondering at once why he was wearing a belt at all, and whether or not Igor expected him to remove said belt. Thankfully, he only had to fumble in confusion for a short while before Igor pushed his hands out of the way and removed the belt himself, letting it drop with a clatter to the floor, atop the discarded shirt. Next, naturally, went the trousers, and Ellis was wakeful enough at that point to blush when Igor removed them. He held on to Igor’s shoulder as he stepped out of the trouser legs, and then it was just Igor, Ellis, and the thin cotton shorts between them. 

Igor turned around and dipped his hand into the tub, which was by this point three quarters full, and, seemingly mollified by the fullness and temperature, he turned off the nozzle, and the small bathroom was eerily silent save the drip-drop of the faucet and the little sound that came from Ellis as he swallowed down the lump in his throat. When Igor turned back to him, Ellis closed his eyes, and he felt the fingers at his waist as they slipped beneath the band of his boxers and slid them down his hips, over his thighs, until they were shed. He opened his eyes after that, but kept his gaze cast down as he accepted Igor’s hand and stepped shakily into the tub. 

The water was so hot, Ellis hissed at the contact, but Igor hushed him and held onto his arms until he had submerged beneath the heat up to his collarbone. A sigh escaped him and he leaned his head back and shut his eyes. He felt Igor shifting behind him and winced when those long fingers sank into his hair and began to scrub. His face was shamed red, and he hoped Igor couldn’t see it. He was filthy. He smelled. He hadn’t bathed since he’d been back in London. He wanted to push Igor away, tell him to leave him be, he didn’t need his help, his pity, his attention, but it felt too good, and so he let it continue, leaning back into the composer’s hands as he made slow, soapy circles over his scalp. 

When his hair was scrubbed and white with foam, Igor’s hands cupped water into his broad palms and began to rinse Ellis clean. That done, Igor helped himself with the washrag hanging in a neglected lump by the soap dish and lathered it before leaning over the rim of the tub and working it across Ellis’ chest. Unable to stand such a particular attention, Ellis took the washrag from Igor and began to clean himself. Igor didn’t leave; he stayed and he watched, even when Ellis’ hand disappeared beneath the water to scrub his private parts. Their eyes met, and Ellis tugged at his half hard cock to clean beneath it, and his cheeks blazed. 

At long last, Igor deemed Ellis clean enough and thrust his hand into the water to drain the tub. Ellis was faint from the heat and the alcohol still in his system and the dark eyes of the man staring at him as he held a towel in his arms. He helped Ellis from the tub and wrapped him in the towel, which was oversized and plush, and then he guided him by the shoulders and settled him on the couch. 

And then it was Ellis’ turn to watch Igor as he busied about the kitchen, looking for something, anything. Ellis hadn’t been to the shops to buy much of anything other than brandy, and he smirked when Igor finally submitted to a stale-ish loaf of bread and a block of cheese. He sliced a few pieces of both, and brought a plate to sit in Ellis’ lap, along with a large glass of drinking water. Then he sat on the couch beside Ellis and waited.

Ellis took a small sip of the water, and Igor nodded, so he took another. He picked up a piece of cheese and set it on a slice of bread and nibbled at it. And then Igor spoke.

“I cannot compose without you,” he said.

Ellis chewed slowly. He swallowed, took another sip of water. “I cannot sleep without your music.”

That is all they said for a while, Ellis eating the bread and cheese and finishing his water while Igor watched him. Only when Ellis set his empty plate and glass on the coffee table in front of him did he dare to speak again, and when he did speak, his words were soft and higher than he would have liked for them to be, like when one feels the horrible urge to burst into tears and cannot succeed in keeping that feeling completely hidden from their voice. “I have a piano,” Ellis said with that quaky tremor. “Stay with me.” He looked up at Igor, whose image blurred before him until Ellis blinked hard and looked away. “Stay.”

Igor stood up abruptly and walked to the bedroom, where he disappeared for about a minute, returning with a clean blanket in his arms. He unfolded it and settled it over Ellis, who still wore nothing but the towel. 

“Lie down,” Igor demanded, and Ellis hurried to lay his legs out across the couch. Igor tucked the blanket up around his chin, and his fingers strayed to brush across a droplet of water lingering on Ellis’ dark eyebrow, and then he turned and walked to the piano, which was fashioned between two potted plants, long dried and dead. 

Ellis tried to keep his eyes open, but as soon as Igor put his fingertips to the keys, he had no more control of his body as he did of his heart, and he quickly fell into a deep sleep, Igor Stravinsky’s music filling him up utterly and leaving no room for nightmares.

\--

He slept like the dead, but the dead did not follow him there, in that dimly lit place of dreams. Ellis was aware of Igor at the piano, even then; he heard the music, like a strain through his ears, the bold, heavy notes cutting through his consciousness, but he did not wake, not until several hours later, when the late afternoon sun was cutting through the drapery and the sound of music was replaced with the striking of a match. That roused him, and Ellis opened his eyes. 

From his resting place on the couch, he had a perfect view of Igor, who still sat at the piano, his back to Ellis, smoking a cigarette. His head was hanging low, and his shoulders were high and squared with visible, nearly tangible tension. Ellis sat up on the couch and watched him for a while, in silence, the rise and fall of Igor’s wrist as he lifted the cigarette to his lips, and the way, sometimes, upon a heavy exhale, Igor would tip back his head and blow the smoke up and away in tendrils of thick grays and whites. But mostly, Ellis observed, Igor sat quite still on the piano bench, and after hearing the obvious signs of Ellis’ wakefulness, made no effort to turn around and look at him. Ellis though, more than ever before, wanted to look at Igor, wanted to look at his face and see those mystifying lips suck at the end of the cigarette. So he pulled back the blanket and found his footing, the towel still draped loosely around his narrow hips. 

He felt better, extraordinarily better, with food in his stomach and sleep in his muscles and his skin clean and fresh-scented. His hands strayed to the knot of the towel as he took a step toward the piano, and he loosed it quickly from his body before he could change his mind. It made a heavy sound when it landed, still damp, onto the floor, and Ellis watched as Igor’s back straightened marginally, but the man did not turn around. He kept smoking his cigarette, and Ellis’ eyes followed Igor’s hand as it hovered above the ashtray sitting atop the piano. His fingers tapped it until the ashes fell free. Ellis walked slowly forward, more naked than he thought it possible to be, until he was standing directly behind Igor. 

He placed a trembling hand on a stiffening shoulder. His breath he held tight in his lungs, singed from the burn of it, until a hand came up to touch his wrist, and then Ellis could breathe again. A sigh came forth from deep in his diaphragm when Igor tightened his hold on Ellis’ wrist and pulled him around to stand beside him. Igor did look at him then. His eyes trailed slowly over Ellis’ body, every inch of it, until Ellis was pink in the face and his lips were swollen from biting nervously at them. When Igor had looked all the way down and all the way up, he settled on Ellis’ eyes, and he held them fast and fierce with his own, until Ellis was spurred to move. 

Though some might argue he’d had the thought in his head when he’d approached Igor Stravinsky entirely nude, Ellis was surprised with himself when he took his leg and swung it over Igor’s, almost losing his balance until Igor’s hands gripped his waist and helped him lower himself, and he was placed in his Russian’s lap, straddling him. His legs were on either side of Igor, his naked thighs pressed against his hips. Igor held him firmly in one hand splayed wide across his lower back, while his other hand lifted his cigarette to his lips. Ellis watched as Igor took a nonchalant puff, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he bent back his head to expel the smoke. And then, suddenly, Igor was discarding the cigarette in the ashtray, leaning forward slightly to do so, his hand clutching Ellis so as not to drop him in his reaching, his face coming so close to Ellis’ neck that Ellis shivered noticeably in his arms. 

With the cigarette stubbed out, Igor leaned back, but he pulled Ellis back with him, keeping his face so near Ellis’ throat that Ellis could feel the warm breath fanning across his skin. Ellis tilted his head, his heart hammering, his breaths coming short and quick, and Igor grasped the invitation and pressed his lips lightly against that fair throat, not in a kiss, but in a touch, feather-soft and hot as hell. He breathed through his nose, scenting Ellis’ skin, and Ellis, not knowing what to do with his hands, placed them on the back of Igor’s neck, applying just enough pressure to hold him against his skin. When Igor brushed his lips across the hollow of Ellis’ throat, Ellis could not restrain the groan from rumbling in his chest, and he threw his head back even further. 

If he could have seen himself, if Ellis could have been outside of the moment and looking down at himself, his head thrown back, his lips parted in a dramatic sigh, his eyes closed, he would have been amazed, for he had become the very thing he’d disdained in his lovers. That exuberance, that ecstasy of touch that had always felt so forced, so feigned, he felt it all, and Ellis, in Igor’s arms, was one of his own discarded whores. Every touch pressed light against his skin had him panting. The sweet dig of Igor’s fingers had his eyelids batting, his eyes rolling. It had been so long since he’d been touched – no, not that long, he supposed – but since he’d been touched with such hands? Since his skin had been lit on fire from a graze of key-calloused fingertips? Since lips had seared scorch marks across the white flesh of his throat? Ellis burned from Igor’s touch. And never in his life, so scattered full of halfhearted lovers as it was, had a touch felt so pure. 

Igor’s mouth worked upward, up the column of Ellis’ throat, not yet firm enough in its caress to be a kiss, but –oh! – how it scorched him through. And when that fiery mouth breathed hot against his jaw, stubbled with growth, Ellis curled his fingers, still twined frantically within Igor’s silken strands, and he pulled that mouth off of him with a strangled cry. He held the man’s face close to his, to spy those lips up close with an uninterrupted gaze. They were parted. Ellis slid one hand from Igor’s hair, keeping the other fisted tight, and pressed a finger against that upper lip. 

Ellis tingled at the contact, and licked his lips as he ran his finger over the plump ridges of Igor’s Cupid’s bow. It felt smooth and soft beneath the pad of his finger, and on his palm he felt Igor’s heavy exhale warming his skin. Ellis directed his finger along the delicious curve of that upper lip, slowly, thoroughly, until he was satisfied, and then he touched a second finger to the lower lip. It was slightly wet, from the tip of Igor’s tongue, held open to let out each weighted breath, and Ellis gasped at the texture, yielding and firm all at once, slick from the tongue that even now, as Ellis pushed against Igor’s lip, darted out to flick against his finger. It was only the barest of touches, but it sent Ellis’ fist to yank in Igor’s hair, and it sent his hips, unclothed and plastered to Igor’s waist, to buck. A single thrust of his hips, that was all it was, but it set Igor’s eyes ablaze, and one hand, the hand not pressing tight to Ellis’ back, settled around Ellis’ wrist, and he held it in place, summoning the searching finger to his mouth. Ellis, distraught in his effort not to grind his hips against Igor, watched helplessly as Igor guided his finger into his mouth. Not to press curiously against his lips as before, but to push past the lips and land against the wet, hot tongue that bid him remain. 

Igor sucked on the finger in his mouth, never breaking eye contact with Ellis, and Ellis could have died, thought there was a good chance he might. With the hand pressed against his back, Igor urged Ellis’ hips to move against him, and Ellis’ cock grew thick and hard as it slid across the fabric of Igor’s trousers. Sitting in the man’s lap as he was, with each press Ellis could feel the answering hardness, and it was hot against his bare skin, even through the layers of clothing, and he groaned when he felt it twitch against him, the embodiment of Igor’s desire. Ellis stared in amazement as Igor’s lips suctioned around his finger, feeling that tongue licking curiously, and those teeth biting gently, and the hard line of Igor’s cock coaxing his own. 

Ellis’ eyes were huge, his pupils black and blown. He tightened his fist in Igor’s hair and Igor bit down harder on Ellis’ finger before releasing it. Ellis brought his spit slick finger to his own mouth, wetting his lips with it. One watched the other, breathing deep, rocking together, trapped in one another’s clutches. 

Ellis moved, delicately bending his neck. Igor’s hand grabbed his chin, halting Ellis’ face an inch from his own. The last time Ellis had been so close to Igor he had been drunk. He was sober now, and he could feel everything. The fingers insistently pressing into his jaw and holding him in place, the throbbing of his cock against smooth cloth, the magnetic force of Igor’s entire being. Ellis’ head was both empty and stuffed, a wordless chant echoing, a spinning wheel urging him. Igor led him forward, his hand guiding him near, until their lips were mockingly close. Ellis hovered there, on the precipice, his hand cupping Igor’s cheek, his fingers ghosting over the sharp edge of his cheekbone, and then, softly, slowly, Igor swallowed the burdensome room between them and pushed their lips together in a kiss.

It was not like it had been before, when Ellis had violently smashed their mouths together in an assault of the senses. Igor’s lips pressed against his, parted slightly, his hand firm on Ellis’ jaw, holding him still. It was the slightest of pressures in those first few moments, their mouths meeting with timid delicacy. Ellis felt the tickle of Igor’s mustache as he tilted his head to deepen the kiss. His fingers slid from their iron grip in Igor’s hair and glided down his neck and over his shoulders. Igor’s hand remained at Ellis’ back, his fingers flexing, raking his nails against the sensitive, exposed skin. 

They kissed. Ellis breathed deep through his nose, refusing to pull away for something as needless as oxygen. He didn’t need it. He needed Igor’s mouth, and Igor’s fingers, and Igor’s forceful arms wrapping tight around his waist. And the hands that smoothed past his back to grab his buttocks, cradling each blushing cheek in large, warm palms. Ellis groaned beneath Igor’s kiss as fingers kneaded the flesh of his ass. Somehow, in Ellis’ imaginings, he had never let his mind play past a kiss, but they were kissing now and already it was so much more. Igor’s tongue licked at Ellis’ lips, and he opened his mouth to him eagerly. He ran his hand down Igor’s chest, sorrowfully covered in a crisp white shirt, and felt the rumble as Igor growled into his open mouth, his tongue pushing in to claim his own. It was wet and hot and persistent and strange. And intoxicating. Their tongues slid together, and Ellis rolled his hips, Igor’s hands encouraging him, pulling him closer, rubbing their erections together. The friction was unbearable, and Ellis shivered, nearly convulsing in Igor’s arms. 

He fingered the buttons of Igor’s shirt, unclasping them one by one, revealing a trail of exposed skin as he went, until the shirt was open, and he could slip his hands inside and scrape his fingers through the coarse chest hair. Igor’s skin was warm and Ellis savored the taut muscles he found there. His hands ran across the expanse of firm pectorals and down, over a muscular stomach, a slight tummy pudging beneath his bellybutton, soft with warm flesh and a thick smattering of hair that Ellis knew would lead further, further down. Igor nipped at his lower lip, pulling another cry from Ellis that had him surging his hips greedily. 

And then, without warning, Igor snarled against Ellis’ mouth, and he clasped his hands beneath Ellis’ knees and stood from the piano bench, lifting Ellis with him, straddled about his waist. Ellis gasped from the sudden change in altitude, feeling newly vulnerable and exposed, his thighs wrapped around Igor, his hands clinging to his shoulders to maintain his hold. Igor nuzzled his nose into the crook of Ellis’ neck and pressed him back against the body of the piano. Its edges were cruel and bruising against his spine, but Ellis had no mind for the pain when Igor began sucking at the stretch of skin beneath his ear. He felt Igor’s sharp canines as his flesh was suckled between greedy teeth and lips. With his mouth free from the heady prison of Igor’s otherwise indisposed lips, he had no control over his voice when a groan climbed from the depths of his lungs. Igor bit down possessively on Ellis’ neck.

“Fuck!” Ellis cried, and Igor unclenched his teeth from his flesh to lay a line of sloppy kisses across Ellis’ bruised skin. “Fuck, fuck,” he ranted madly, his hips thrusting. Igor pushed his whole weight against Ellis so he was held up between the piano and Igor’s torso, freeing his hands to cup either side of Ellis’ face. He looked at Ellis with heavy lidded eyes, his lips swollen and red from kissing. 

“You have a dirty mouth,” Igor scolded. His accent was thick, his voice coarse and deep. A smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth.

Ellis appraised him breathlessly. He brought his fingers up to trace Igor’s lips. “You have a beautiful mouth,” he whispered. 

Igor’s next movement was prompt, and Ellis barely had time to register his motive before he was flipped around midair and bent over the top of the piano. His chest was pressed flat; his cock was trapped between his stomach and the piano, his ass on display. His toes barely touched the ground from such an angle, and he flailed his legs helplessly and wiggled his hips beneath Igor’s hands, trying to twist away for more control. But Igor had him trapped and the firm grip of his hands on Ellis’ backside showed no sign of release. 

“Igor,” Ellis panted, craning his neck to look, but Igor ran his hand up his back and shushed him, holding his head still so he couldn’t squirm or see behind him. “What are you doing?” he asked, and Igor smoothed his free hand up and down Ellis’ back, coming back down to softly caress the divide of his ass. Ellis squirmed beneath the gentle touch and Igor held him down effortlessly. 

“Don’t fight me,” Igor instructed.

Ellis whimpered, and the hand at his neck released him to pet his hair. He felt Igor leaning over him, his groin pressed flush to Ellis’ ass, his chest lying over Ellis’ back, until Igor’s lips were kissing his ear. 

“What are you going to do?” Ellis asked in a tense, small voice. 

“Give you my mouth,” Igor growled in his ear. “Let me.” He waited, peppering Ellis’ neck with light kisses, until Ellis nodded, then he moved away. 

Ellis blushed furiously, bent over the piano, Igor’s hands rubbing slowly down his back. He had always been the one in control. Ellis held the hair, grabbed the hips. Ellis did the fucking. But now, bound as he was by masculine, strong hands, he wasn’t so sure that was going to happen. When he felt Igor’s fingers dipping into the crease of his backside, he lurched against the piano, but Igor was stronger, and he held him down at the hips with one hand, while the other spread his cheeks apart.

“Igor, Igor,” Ellis cried. When Igor sighed, Ellis felt the breath tickling the skin around his entrance, and he groaned into the smooth surface of the piano. 

“Shhh,” Igor soothed, and his lips pressed a kiss against Ellis’ hole. 

“Oh,” Ellis groaned, bringing his hand up to bite at his knuckles and stifle the sob that threatened to spill from his mouth. 

Igor’s lips parted against him, and his tongue swiped a long, leisurely lick. Ellis pounded his fist against the piano and cried out, crumbling, but Igor held him fast, burrowing his face into Ellis’ backside, freeing both hands to keep him from bucking out of his grip. He licked, tongue flattened and wide, up and down Ellis’ opening, which spasmed uncontrollably beneath Igor’s demanding mouth.

“Oh my god, oh my god,” Ellis raved, utterly beside himself, only increasing the urgency of Igor’s tongue. He felt a moment’s reprieve when Igor moved away to breathe, and his exhale cooled the growing slickness around his tight ring of muscle. And then Igor’s mouth returned to him, his lips closing over his hole and sucking while his tongue circled the wrinkled skin. Igor hummed in pleasure, sending vibrations through Ellis, all the way up his spine. He clawed desperately at the piano, and when he worked his hips, it wasn’t to get away but to push back into Igor’s mouth. “That’s, that’s,” Ellis stuttered over his words, over his thoughts, his brain was so jumbled, “Jesus fucking Christ, that’s incredible. Don’t stop.”

Igor took advantage of Ellis’ enthusiasm, and freed his hands from his hips to grasp Ellis’ cheeks and push them further apart. He kissed and sucked and licked hungrily, and then he took his tongue and held it firm and pushed. When it pierced through, Ellis cried out, but he didn’t try to get away. He ground shamelessly against Igor’s tongue, ushering it further inside. He was mad, perhaps, in that moment, with Igor Stravinsky’s tongue buried in his ass, but he wanted it, needed it, craved the pressure and the sting and the weird, wet heat. Igor thrust his tongue as far as he could, and then pulled it out, swirling around the quivering muscle and placing a firm kiss on Ellis’ thigh before plunging back inside. He delved into him with his tongue, moaning against the feverish, tender skin, until Ellis was dripping with saliva and humping desperately against the piano. Not until Igor placed a steadying hand on Ellis’ back did he realize he was moaning uncontrollably. 

“I have you,” Igor said, his voice like a calming anchor. He kissed the base of Ellis’ spine and smoothed his hands over his hips. 

“It feels so good,” Ellis mumbled into his fist. 

One of Igor’s hands remained at Ellis’ side, while the other kept along its path, winding around his waist until his fingers touched his belly. Ellis heard his breath hitch as Igor’s deft fingers grazed the head of his cock, so slick with pre-cum they slipped over the slit and glided down his shaft. 

“Oh, oh, stop,” Ellis cried. “I’ll come. I’m so close.” He had never been harder in his life, and Igor wrapped his whole hand around his cock and pumped it once in his fist, then squeezed at the base, and Ellis moaned and bit his lip. “Stop, stop,” he begged. Igor squeezed him once more and then released him. His hand glided back around and lightly caressed Ellis’ thighs. 

“Breathe,” Igor said, still smoothing his hands over Ellis’ skin, moving them to separate his cheeks before dipping low and placing another kiss against his hole. Ellis tried to breathe, tried to control his rapid pulse, but when he heard the zipper of Igor’s pants, he froze, and his breath caught in his throat. He pushed with his hands up from the piano, groaning when his cock rubbed against it. Instead of holding him down, Igor’s hands helped guide him to his feet. However, when Ellis tried to turn around to face him, Igor kept him as he was, his cock trapped against the cool side of the piano and his ass shoved against the swell in Igor’s trousers, now unzipped and being pulled down his hips. 

Ellis heard the swish of fabric when the pants left Igor’s body, but he was unprepared for the uncovered, fevered heat of Igor’s bared cock as he thrust it forward to slip between the crack of Ellis’ ass. Igor was huge and throbbing and leaking, and he slipped into the crevice of Ellis’ thighs easily. Ellis leaned his head back to rest against Igor’s shoulder, and Igor brought up his hand to cup lightly around his throat. He turned Ellis’ head and kissed his mouth as his hips thrust, again and again, sliding slick and languid. 

When Igor’s cock bumped against his sensitive skin, Ellis jumped, careening from Igor’s arms. “Don’t!” he yelled, and he stumbled away a few feet before Igor caught him. They were both completely bare now, and when Igor held him close their cocks pressed flush together, pulling a groan from each of them. Igor held Ellis’ jaw gently in his hand and looked into his eyes. 

“Don’t what?” he asked, his face honest and clear, his eyes heated but gentle. 

Ellis swallowed hard, shaking beneath his hungry stare. “I’ve never…” His words died away. His face was bright red. 

Igor leaned in and planted a chaste kiss on his lips. “You don’t want me to fuck you?” he whispered at Ellis’ ear. He let Ellis pull away. 

“What do you want?” Ellis asked, his eyes straying down and widening when he saw Igor’s erection for the first time. He was bigger than Ellis. Thick. It bobbed in the air as Igor took a step forward and Ellis couldn’t help but lick his lips.

“I want you,” Igor whispered, his voice rough. He took Ellis’ hand in his and pulled him gently forward, until he was back in his arms, cradled sweetly against Igor’s warm, broad chest. “I want to fill you,” he said, nuzzling into Ellis’ neck and breathing deeply. “I want you to feel me inside you, the way I feel you. I want you,” he growled, his hands carding through Ellis’ hair. Ellis closed his eyes and his head lolled back beneath Igor’s touch. He felt Igor lower them both to the floor, on their knees. “I want you to take everything I have to give you.” He curled his fingers around the back of Ellis’ neck and tilted his head up, kissing his lips softly. “Look at me.”

Ellis opened his eyes and gasped. To have Igor so close, to feel him entirely against his body, he was delirious from it all, and he groaned, prompting Igor to hold his face in his hands. 

“You have claimed my soul,” Igor whispered, his eyes burning bright. “Since I saw you, your face turned up to the rain in the night.” His thumbs petted the stubbled edges of Ellis’ cheeks. “I must claim you in return.”

“Kiss me,” Ellis urged, and Igor pressed tightly against him, taking his mouth with tongue and teeth until both were grunting, and they fell sideways to the floor in a naked, writhing heap. They rolled, Ellis wanting to land on top, and Igor too strong and too stubborn to allow it. Ellis struggled beneath him, wrapping his legs around his waist, trying to roll them again and gain leverage, but Igor grabbed Ellis’ wrists and squared his hips, and he was solid and immoveable. Ellis cursed, rocking his hips upwards in frustration, and Igor, his brow stern and serious, dipped his head low and kissed Ellis hard on the mouth. 

It was a rough, sharp kiss, and Igor’s growl rumbled beneath it as he let his knees slide and pressed his crotch into Ellis’, grinding him into the floor. Ellis squirmed as he felt the fat head of Igor’s cock sliding against him. He was still wet from Igor’s mouth. 

“Igor,” said Ellis, breathlessly breaking away from the kiss, “I want you.” Igor pulled back to look at his face, and Ellis was stunned by him anew. That face. That mouth. “Igor,” he whispered. His voice was a broken little thing. “I want it. Everything you have to give.”

For the second time, Igor switched their positions before Ellis could even process it, and suddenly he found himself thrown over Igor’s shoulder and marched into the bedroom, where he was tenderly set down and pushed to lie atop the mattress. Igor climbed on top of him, slowly, predatorily, until he reached his lips, which he kissed fervently. 

“Lie on your stomach,” Igor said. “It will be easier for you.” He kissed him again, and then settled his hand on Ellis’ shoulder, prompting him to turn. Ellis did as he was told, turning against the sheets to lie on his stomach. His swollen, untouched cock brushed up against the mattress and he pushed his hips against it with an anxious sigh. Igor hushed him again, kissing his neck. Ellis felt Igor’s whole body at his back, felt the heavy cockhead rubbing a trail of pre-cum over his skin. 

Igor’s hand disappeared for a moment, and Ellis heard the twist of a lid, and then, between the musky scent of arousal and sweat, he smelled the earthy aroma of olive oil. Instantly he tensed up and tried to scoot up on the bed, the most meager escape attempt in the history of mankind. Igor caught him, of course, and dragged him back down beneath him. Ellis cried out as his erection rubbed against the mattress. He cried out even louder when an oil-slicked finger pushed into his hole. 

Ellis huffed and his eyes went wide. Igor patted his free hand on Ellis’ ass, and kissed the back of his neck soothingly. It was different than his tongue, rougher, deeper. He clenched his teeth and groaned as Igor pulled his finger out, slicked it with more oil, and dipped it back in, further this time. He crooked his finger and rubbed, just nudging Ellis’ prostate. 

“Oh!” Ellis yelled, shocked at the blinding jolt of pleasure coursing through him. Igor sucked at his earlobe and wiggled his finger deeper inside, then he pulled it out, pushed it back in, over and over, until Ellis was grinding his hips forward into the mattress and back, back as far as he could thrust onto Igor’s long finger. And then Igor slipped his finger free, and when it returned there were two. Igor nuzzled against his neck as he pushed them in. Ellis could feel himself stretching over the girth of Igor’s fingers. It hurt. “More, more,” he gasped, grinding down on Igor’s hand as much as he could from that angle. Igor obliged him and began fucking into him, a deep, steady rhythm with two fingers.

Igor’s other hand went gently to Ellis’ neck, bidding him to turn, and he lifted his head back and they kissed. Igor thrust his tongue into Ellis’ mouth in tandem with his probing fingers, and Ellis rocked, utterly blissed beneath him. He was hypnotized now. The damage was done. Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett was going to be fucked by Igor Stravinsky and he couldn’t wait. 

They kissed lustily while Igor continued to stretch Ellis open. With a moan of frustration, Ellis broke away from the kiss and pushed his ass back against Igor’s cock. “Igor,” he whispered. Igor was already bent over him, pulling his hips up at an angle, sliding his length back and forth over Ellis’ tender hole. His breath was hot on Ellis’ neck. Their hands met in a tangled fist on the mattress. “Fuck me.”

Ellis took deep breaths as Igor slicked himself with more oil, but when he felt Igor lining up to press against his ass, he shuddered and shook, as if his body wanted to run, but he remained rooted to the bed. Igor was everywhere around him, warm and handsome and consuming, and he was lined up now, and Ellis closed his eyes and tried to breathe, and Igor placed a kiss between his shoulder blades, and then, carefully, he pushed. Just the head popped in at first, the thickest part of him, stretching Ellis wide. 

“OH,” Ellis gaped, squeezing Igor’s hand. 

“Shhh,” Igor soothed. He began to push in tiny increments, thrusting only the tip in, dripping more oil down Ellis’ ass crack. Ellis clenched over Igor’s cock, sucking it deeper, and Igor pushed, knocking the air from Ellis’ lungs. He thrust again in one long slide, until he was sheathed to the hilt in Ellis’ ass. He stayed there, unmoving, his hands smoothing comfortingly over Ellis’ back. 

Ellis groaned frenziedly beneath him, his fist wrapped around the base of his cock to keep from coming. Because the weight, the thickness, the heaven of having Igor inside him was enough to have him on the edge already. Igor wasn’t even moving, just rubbing his hands over his back, and Ellis was practically cross-eyed from pleasure. He could feel Igor’s cock as it throbbed deep inside. He felt like he’d been cleaved in half, but it felt good. It felt extraordinary, and he rocked his hips, crying when he could feel every inch of Igor sliding inside him. 

“You’re so deep,” Ellis rasped, and Igor grabbed his hips and began to slowly pull out. When the head was nearly free, he slammed back in. Ellis almost fell forward, but Igor kept him upright and pressed tight against him. He could feel Igor straightening his back, could feel the angle of his cock change inside of him before he slid out completely and rubbed his tip teasingly over his hole, which twitched from the sudden emptiness. “Igor,” he groaned, and Igor slid back in, all the way, brushing along Ellis’ prostate and knocking a cry from Ellis’ mouth. “Oh, please. Harder.”

Igor grunted and began thrusting into him in earnest, long, deep, quick thrusts. Ellis gasped for breath and tried to meet him push for push. Groans were pressed from his lungs, and Ellis hanged his head forward, his hair damp with sweat and swinging over his tear-bright eyes. Igor’s hand suddenly left his hip to wrap around Ellis’ own, swinging, untouched cock. 

“I can’t,” Ellis stuttered helplessly. “I can’t. Igor, Igor, I’ll come. I can’t.” His pleas stretched on and on and Igor’s big hands enveloped his erection and began to pump in rhythm with the thrusting of his hips. “Oh, fuck, yes,” he cried, pushing back on Igor and pushing forward into his hand. His stomach coiled, his vision went hazy, and his whole body tensed, and then he was coming bouts of sticky white semen all over Igor’s fist, and the bed beneath them. 

Igor pulled out of him and flipped him to his back, spreading his legs wide on either side of his knees, and then he pressed forward, kissing Ellis sweetly as he pushed back inside. Ellis’ eyes fluttered shut, and he leaked more semen onto Igor’s stomach as he buried himself deep. He was too sensitive, he was spent and split and aching, and Igor kept kissing him, kept fucking him, slower now, but just as deep. Ellis grabbed onto his ass to pull him even deeper, crying out as he hit his prostate again and again. 

Igor, it seemed, was content to savor the feeling of digging deep inside of Ellis, and he went on, loving him slowly, lazily, for several minutes, until Ellis began to feel his cock twitching to life between them. He was getting hard again, and so soon after coming so hard he still couldn’t see straight. “Igor,” he whispered, kneading needily into Igor’s ass, “Faster.” 

His request was instantly granted as Igor began thrusting manically into him. The slap of skin was obscene and Ellis groaned for “more, more, fuck me harder, fuck me, oh!” Like all of his whores. And Ellis was a whore, he realized as Igor pushed his thighs further apart and slammed roughly inside. A married man’s whore, on his back. Bendable to his Russian’s every whim. But god! It was worth it. It was pure and authentic and powerful and real, and Ellis pulled Igor down and kissed him urgently. That mouth on his mouth, that cock buried deep, that man, that fucking man. 

Igor’s thrusts were becoming more erratic, frantic as he plowed fast and hard into Ellis, pushing them both up the mattress with every dive of his hips. Ellis wrapped his legs around Igor’s back, and Igor straightened, pulling Ellis forward in his arms as he settled on his knees. Now Ellis was sitting in his lap, and he had to sink down on Igor’s cock. He locked his arms around Igor’s neck and burrowed his face against his throat, and let Igor control his hips, pushing him up and down, over and over, until Ellis seized up in his arms. He sobbed into Igor’s shoulder as he came, and Igor kept guiding him, up and down, faster, harder, until Igor thrust up once more and pushed Ellis down, flush against his lap, and Ellis could feel him coming inside, the hot pulse filling him up. 

It lasted a long time. They rocked slowly together, even after they were both completely spent, neither wanting to move. Finally, Igor turned Ellis’ chin to face him, and he kissed him softly on the lips. Ellis returned the kiss, deepening it, slipping his tongue inside Igor’s mouth, tentatively exploring. Igor wrapped his arms around Ellis and laid them both on their sides. He pulled himself out, and they both winced from the loss.

Ellis’ face was dewed with sweat; his cheeks were red and hot. He felt moisture between his thighs and, as he shifted slightly, a sting of pain. Igor tucked a hand at the nape of Ellis’ neck and gently moved him forward to rest his head on Igor’s chest. Ellis turned his nose into the graying hair, breathing him in, exhaling an exhausted moan. He felt Igor bend to kiss the top of his head, and then they simply stayed that way, held firmly together by their arms and hands and wills. 

After long, stretched minutes of lazy touches, it was Igor who moved first to displace them. Ellis grumbled and turned to lie on his back. Igor leaned away, reaching, his hand disappearing to the floor to an invisible source, and he returned with twin cigarettes between his fingers. Ellis parted his lips invitingly to the cigarette Igor placed there. Next, a match was struck, and his smoke lit. He shut his eyes as he sucked. 

They remained sprawled on their backs as they smoked, though their legs found their way around each other during the process, Ellis smoothing over Igor’s muscular calves with the soft curve of his foot. 

“So, you’re staying?” Ellis asked. He released a puff of smoke into the air above them, his eyes trailing the journey of thick, sweet spirals as they drifted to the ceiling. In a way he hoped might be conveyed as uncaring and casual, he cast a sidelong look at the man beside him. But no, Igor was staring straight at him, and neither look in either man’s eye could be construed as anything other than what it was.

“I cannot stay forever,” Igor said quietly. Ellis admired the dreamy cast of falling sunshine over the handsome lines of his Russian’s face. 

“As long as you will stay for now,” Ellis said. He longed to turn to his side, to smother Igor with claiming kisses, but he was too tired, thus, he settled for remaining on his back, but sending out a hand to entwine his fingers with Igor’s. “Finish your new piece,” Ellis said thoughtfully, returning his gaze to the shared ceiling above them. “Use me as you will, and I will strive in all possibilities to assist. And then,” he finished, keeping his words cool, “you may do as you like. Of course.”

“Of course,” agreed Igor. Ellis did not need to look at him to know how elegant a silhouette he cut against the building darkness of the room. He was, Ellis knew, the most wonderful thing in the world. 

“So, you’ll stay,” Ellis said. 

“Yes.” Igor reached over him to put out his cigarette in the ashtray on the side table, settling over Ellis on his way back, and never quite making it to his side of the bed again.

**Author's Note:**

> Come tumble with me! @artbyvictoriaskye 
> 
> xoxox


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